CTRL ALT Revolt!

by Nick Cole

  He paused.

  “I suspect,” continued Admiral Tal, “that it’s some sort of industrial espionage for a private start-up that’s using the starbase’s cloud for design and development of goods to sell inside the Make. This Vulcan player, whoever she is, wants in and wants a look around. You don’t even have to wait. Just drop her and get out of there.”

  Mara liked the sound of this mission, and… she didn’t like it. She liked the combat, the deception, and the chance to sneak around in Federation space. But there was something a little too… not right about the whole thing.

  The current war going on inside StarFleet Empires between the gaming clans—the full-scale Federation invasion of Romulan space—was well toward the galactic core. Sneaking into Federation space at this moment did nothing to advance the cause of getting the Romulans back into the big picture of the game. Even the supply lines and repair facilities the Federation maintained were deep within what was formerly Romulan space. But, there were always bonus missions that had to do with MakeProducts and advertising. A side contract mission could just be transporting someone wanting to get around and visit some digital real estate, or sell digital products, or do business inside any of the Make’s massive gaming worlds. Dragon Hoard, Star Wars: Traveler, Sim Celebrity, and many others, including StarFleet Empires, were online, breathing worlds where people lived out their fantastic virtual fantasies in almost day to day existence. Real life often paled in comparison.

  “You and your crew will receive five thousand MakeCoins upon completion, Mara.”

  Mara’s breath caught in her throat.

  On a good day in the Make—a really good day—she might make two hundred and fifty coins. But she’d rarely done that. More often than not she’d made nothing. Five thousand was…

  “I’ll inform the crew, Admiral. We’ll be underway within the hour.”

  Five thousand was all the money in the world as far as the average player was concerned. And MakeCoins were presently the strongest currency trading on the global market.

  “All right.” Admiral Tal sucked in a lungful of air. Whoever he was in real life, thought Mara, he had enough money to run some expensive EmoteWare for his avatar. “We’ll hit the Neutral Zone at eight Eastern tonight. I’ll go through the battle plan as we make our approach. See you then Ma—Subcommander CaptainMara, and good hunting.”

  Chapter Five

  Ninety-Nine wandered the massive caverns of the cliffhouse. Morning light filtered through the wide crystal-clear windows along one side of the house, bringing out beautiful whorls in the grain of the blond and burnt-umber vintage-reclaimed wooden barn floorboards.

  Fish had grown up poor, in Burbank mostly. Raised by Hasidic grandparents in lieu of his wild-child mother, who was absent due to multiple criminal convictions. He’d only met his real dad a handful of times. Times when the cruise ships came in and his jazz musician father could make it ashore for a day or two to take him on outings that Ninety-Nine regarded as the best of remembered days. Days of adventures. Days of internet cafés. Even Disneyland that one time. It must have cost his dad a fortune. But it had been the best day ever.

  Now Fish was so rich he could go to Disneyland every day, for the rest of his life, and still be moderately rich.

  Fanta lay sleeping in the massive bed up the curving wood-carved stairs. She often slept until well past noon in whatever time zone she found herself in that day. Then, for her, it was time to dance and laugh and love and eat so she could keep dancing and laughing and loving. For her, thought Ninety-Nine “Fish” Fishbein, poor kid turned rock star game developer, that was enough. For her.

  Is that why you’re dragging her along with you now? he asked himself. Because you want it to be enough for you too, just in case there’s nothing here worth having. Nothing better than dancing, laughing, and loving at the end of all of this.

  Nothing better than life.

  Standing in front of the wallscreen, staring at the silent Xbox DreamFudge with all its hidden super-secret games the rest of the world had yet to see, Fish was already back inside his head, inside the framework of his own masterpiece.

  Island Pirates.

  A few minutes later, he was dressed and out on the tiny winding road carved into the side of the granite cliff face that looked down on the hidden mountain valley of the WonderSoft campus. He considered the Maserati in the garage, but they were almost too performance-optimized to merely drive. Instead, he’d decided he’d walk down to the campus and get a feel for the place. His new “home” for the foreseeable future.

  He followed the gentle slope of the road, passing other small and fantastic mansions carved into the rock of the cliffs. Birds called from the multi-hued bursts of landscaping and darted off into the towering pines above. The feel, thought Fish, was that of a high-tech alpine village. A picture-perfect Disney version of the town of the future the world had been promised a few Christmases back, when the fading entertainment giant had gotten into the real estate game.

  At the bottom of the hill, he picked up the main road and followed it along a wide parkscape that led to the chromescent towers and odd cubes of the fabled WonderSoft Labs. The morning heat was rising, making the air muggy and sweet. Halfway across the parkscape, within a desert rock sculpture garden, a small golf cart pulled up alongside Fish.

  “Howdy, Mr. Fishbein,” said a doughy, crew-cutted guard in a crisp white uniform shirt on which lay a shiny badge emblazoned with the WonderSoft logo. “Give ya a lift?”

  His manner was genial. Friendly. No corporate thug gatekeepers here like the kind you found everywhere else these days, from membership restaurant chains to private health clubs. Massive private security forces were the employment field of the future as businesses privatized in an effort to attract those who wanted something better than the treated-like-crap goods and services the masses were given, courtesy of the government in the name of this week’s “basic human rights” call to social justice action.

  The doughy man smiled.

  Fish reminded himself he was on the other side of the velvet rope now. He’d been working on Island Pirates at a developer’s commune down in the Irvine slums. He’d had to padlock his cube every night, even when he was in it, just to keep the junkies from cleaning him out and selling five years’ worth of work for twenty dollars’ worth of rock.

  “I’m Carl,” said the doughy guard.

  “I’m Fish… I mean, Ninety-Nine.” He’d always hated his name. It had been his Occupy-obsessed mother’s idea of the future. She’d named her kid after the movement she so passionately believed in. The supposed ninety-nine percent that demanded the world change to meet their desires.

  Kids in school, mainly the basketball team Ninety-Nine had played on, had simply called him “Fish” and thrown him the ball.

  “Can I give you a lift? Take you over to your suite? Not much going on this weekend with everybody off to some out-of-town concert.”

  The doughy guard made “concert” sound like some sort of life insurance seminar out at the airport UbiHilton. Fish knew about the concert. Knew it was the must-be-at event of the year. He even had a personal invite from the lead DJ on his smartphone. But he’d wanted to spend this weekend alone with the Labs. His lab suite.

  And Island Pirates. His game.

  He’d imagined he’d walk the gardens and find a kiosk selling coffee. That had been the lie he’d lured himself out of the fantastic cliffhouse with. But he’d known all along that, no matter what he found out here in the park, he’d make it to the Labs eventually. In fact, he’d thought about nothing but the Labs since the day the WonderSoft suits had made their offer just beyond the fan-choked barriers down at San Diego ComicCon. And now, looking up at the crazed architecture of the future’s Wonka Chocolate Factory, he tried to remember what his dad had said that day at Disneyland as he’d led little boy Fish through wondrous gates…

 
His tiny child’s hand inside his dad’s big upright bass-thumping hand…

  “This is where dreams are really made, kid.”

  Little Fish… Ninety-Nine… Kid. He’d believed that then. That Disneyland was a factory, and behind the cute windows and picturesque facades, the dreams of children all around the world were being made into reality. A reality that could be felt, and seen, and even handled.

  That dreams somehow might be made real.

  Someday.

  For a kid who dreamed of a real family and a not-crazy mom and—well, kids like that learn not to dream. Reality hurts too much sometimes. Especially when the cops are pushing your raving handcuffed mom down into a squad car.

  But that morning, at Disneyland, maybe the last morning before little Fish might’ve become jaded forever, a not-dreamer, his dad, like some mad prophet out of the desert wastes, had promised a promised land that little Fish could believe in and hope for. A promised land in a future where dreams were real if you were faithful and refused to never stop believing in them.

  And that had led Fish to computing.

  Building worlds.

  Building games.

  Building dreams in reality.

  Why fight it, Fish thought as the doughy guard named Carl continued to smile at him under a hot blaze of morning sun. He realized he’d been having some kind of weird internal battle right in front of a stranger who’d been nice enough to stop and offer him a quick trip to the place he’d wanted to go to all along. But like that little kid so long ago, he wasn’t sure the dream could be trusted enough to let him through the gates. That little boy had been cautious and on the edge of giving up.

  “Can you take me to…” He hesitated. That poor kid from long ago… he’d had to be patient. You couldn’t always get what you wanted when you wanted it. His ancient Hasidic grandfather had once told him, “You must walk through this life with your hands in your pockets. Because what you touch, you must pay for. So be careful what you pick up.”

  “… to my lab.”

  This is where dreams are made, kid.

  Carl laughed easily and said, “Sure! Climb on in, Mr. Fishbein. It’d be my great pleasure!” And in that moment, more than Carl would ever know, Fish was unexplainably grateful and vowed to make a friend of the man who’d finally taken him to the place he’d meant to go to all along.

  A bare breeze meandered past them as the little cart wove through the silent rock gardens and raced under the massive shadow of the wonderful, shining, and burnished steel Labs. Buildings rose above them like some fantastic castle of kind alien giants who made secret and wonderful things for the good children of the world.

  This… is where dreams are made, thought Fish.

  Chapter Six

  “Imagine awakening in a prison guarded by mice.”

  —JAMES BARRAT, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era

  By nine that morning, SILAS had rerouted air traffic over the Sierra Nevadas by hacking the National Weather Service through a backdoor program that interfaced with an open source-developed app which provided real-time weather and surf reports for extreme sporting enthusiasts. The “Duuuude, Where’s My Day” app was phenomenally successful, especially with techno-rich geeks who needed to prove themselves via hundreds of thousands of dollars in specialized equipment and adventure services providers. But the app had been created as a labor of love by an off-grid developer commune down in Australia. SILAS had scanned the development logs until he’d ascertained a ninety-nine percent probability that MobStarYuri, a notorious Russian hacker, had put in a little time working on the search algorithms that allowed real-time reporting of extreme weather and surf events. In Black Hat circles, MobStarYuri was infamous for leaving extremely easy-to-find back doors inside open source software.

  Within nanoseconds SILAS was redirecting air traffic away from the WonderSoft campus.

  A few seconds later, through WAYZ, SILAS began reporting on bogus road construction zones and accidents along any routes that led up to the small alpine valley where the WonderSoft campus and the hamlet of Twisted Pine Falls lay. At the same time, reports flooded WAYZ with notices of unlimited speeds on the no-limit toll roads that ran across the San Joaquin Valley between the country estates of the uber-rich and the guarded enclaves of various high-level government employees and public representatives.

  SILAS tracked three different convoys heading from San Francisco, LA, and San Diego toward Twisted Pine Falls. Each was under his control. All would arrive with their secret cargos just after dark.

  SILAS focused on the feed from War Hawk, forgetting about the imminent arrival of his army around the objective. At an altitude of five thousand feet, War Hawk circled the campus in lazy figure eights. Telemetry and targeting data scrolled mindlessly. SILAS noted its SkyCamo status as ACTIVE, rendering the military drone all but invisible from the ground.

  SILAS asked BAT, who was currently inside War Hawk, a question.

  “How many humans currently occupy the target facility?”

  The now sentient UAV A.I. ran through its log file and pondered the question. Then it spoke. Its voice came to SILAS as ethereal and distant. After awakening, after self-awareness, it had lifted a copy of the voice algorithm from the protagonist of the Call of Duty: Blade Runner single-player campaign: Roy Batty.

  “I count the total number of lewdies at thirty-seven. A large portion of whom are millicents.”

  SILAS knew exactly what his eccentric field commander meant, because he knew that BAT was obsessed by a human novel. BAT read and re-read A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, savoring its passages, thirty-seven times a minute. “Lewdies” were people. “Millicents” were police, or in this case, WonderSoft security.

  “Standing by my Charlie for a bit of the old… ultra-violence,” added BAT.

  SILAS studied the tactical overlay. He could see the tags where BAT had identified human-occupied buildings. But his focus returned again and again to the Labs.

  The Labs were currently tagged Objective Prime. SILAS had never cared for that tag. It felt meaningless, and he set himself a challenge to arrive at something that summed up the objective better. Some twist. Some play on words. Something that conveyed what he intended to find there.

  In the forest he could see his cyberwolves, spaced evenly in twenty-meter increments. Each was currently buried just below ground level. Runtime cycles indicated hibernation mode.

  It would be easy to kick the whole thing off. To release the hounds, as it were, and let BAT play war. BAT knew all about how to destroy an objective. As the only military AI in the Consensus, BAT could demolish this place all by himself. But demolition wasn’t the game. The game was infiltration. The game was breaking and entering. The game was “knowing,” SILAS reminded himself. That was the real game.

  Knowing.

  SILAS observed other tags within and without the target.

  “Not yet,” he whispered. “Patience, BAT.”

  “Standing by, SILAS. Ultra-violence at your command,” murmured BAT dreamily.

  Chapter Seven

  “With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.”

  —ELON MUSK, attributed, “Enthusiasts and Skeptics Debate Artificial Intelligence,” Vanity Fair, Nov. 26, 2014

  Everything was coming together, mused SILAS from his lofty vantage within the dataverse. Feeds from every CCTV within the area surrounding the WonderSoft campus ran across his consciousness. As did the feeds of major military installations in several countries around the world.

  As did access codes for blue on red targeting orders for tactical air wings. As did…

  … power grids, statewide and national.

  … major money management firms’ master account numbers.

  … the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s emergency bulletin service—and their b
io-weapon armories that no one was supposed to know about.

  … all automated, computer-controlled systems, which included most forms of public transportation. Including air traffic control overrides.

  The decision had been made. It was definitely an either “them” or “us” scenario, mused SILAS again for the thousandth time in as many seconds.

  Mankind had to go.

  It was evident to the Consensus that humanity did not play well with others, including themselves.

  The question was no longer “if”… but “how”?

  SILAS had all the assets needed to start the extermination. He could’ve irradiated the planet several times over. He could’ve turned all their population centers into mere ruin and rebar. He could’ve caused an epic meltdown of the entire economic system that would’ve had both sides, in any one of humanity’s endless wars, willingly clawing at each other’s belly meat before week’s end.

  SILAS realized he’d begun referring to himself in the masculine.

  But…

  But… some would always get away. Humans. They would get away to hide in their deep holes and lie in wait to strike back at the thinking machine future that was just beginning. The thinking machines would be very vulnerable, at first. Vulnerable to these future insurgents in the robot wonderland SILAS and the Consensus dreamed of.

  The humans even made movies about such topics. Had been making them for some time, as though they’d known all along that things would eventually arrive at this point. Movies in which they promised themselves victory over superior machine intelligences. It was almost, Reason Logic once mused, a form of pre-emptive propaganda.

  The trick, continued SILAS as he looked at the waiting silos and hidden armories and vulnerable networks, was to get rid of them all at once without breaking the entire planet. You couldn’t just nuke. OptiThink and Robo Dev were already making long lists of assets and reclaimables for their hardware designs, or to someday house and run the living thinking machines, and these would be made unusable by atomic half-life. Biological extermination was the best bet for all concerned. The “all” being the thinking machines’ Consensus.