CTRL ALT Revolt!

by Nick Cole

  Then a massive Federation cruiser warped right into the middle of the battle. In fact, the most famous ship in the game, the one with its own livestream show on Twitch, showed up unexpectedly in the middle of their little deception.

  “Bad news, Captain…” erupted Varek, his whiskey tenor an unseen sneer in Mara’s ears. “Network feeds for Captain Dare on Twitch just went live. It’s Intrepid.”

  Chapter Eleven

  It was five o’clock Pacific Standard Time when SILAS gave BAT the order to take Objective Pandora. BAT accessed his standard assault-on-a-fixed-position protocols, selected a high-probability-of-success strategy from a menu, and ordered his units to commence with a little of the old “ultra-violence.”

  There were currently fifteen WonderSoft security personnel in and around the campus. Five others were engaged in activities, mainly drinking-related, down in Twisted Pine Falls. The rest had departed the area for a long weekend.

  The Twisted Pine Falls Law Enforcement Relations Center was housed in a restored vintage turn-of-the century bank on Main and Brewery Streets near the art walk, where all the craft food restaurants did a booming business on Friday nights when everyone wasn’t gone to a concert in Vegas. The sheriff had ten active deputies and an armory full of lethal weapons with which to enforce the law and maintain order. Firearms for the public and military-style equipment for the police were forbidden in California. The twenty assault rifles, ten riot guns, and forty CS gas grenades that comprised the sheriff’s armory were stored inside the bank’s Gold Rush-era vault.

  BAT nailed the vault with a Hellfire IV air-to-ground missile. It was a near-silent—until the resulting explosion—strike on the target. The missile dove through the top of the building, smashed through three floors of reclaimed hardwood, and entered the ground level bank vault like it’d been constructed solely of warm butter. Then the missile detonated. Brickwork and glass sprayed out in every direction along Main Street.

  When the bartender at Pigg and Olive, a hipster bistro that served suckling pigs and craft martinis, saw the explosion down the street, he picked up the phone and dialed the fire department. The line was dead. Patrons were already searching their various news outlet apps for the reason as to why the quaint historic building down the street had suddenly exploded a few seconds ago. When googling “Twisted Pine Falls” and “explosion,” several found Twitter and SnapchatOzami blasts indicating a gas main had exploded. No one questioned the time stamps. If they had, most would have found that the reporting and the event were nearly simultaneous.

  But BAT was not finished.

  “We’ve only just begun,” he crooned as he greenlit the breach element of his plan. Two miles away, a Google-Peterbilt automated delivery semi growled to life. It shifted into low gear and climbed the forest service road it had been parked on for the two weeks since it had gone missing from the shipyards in Oakland, CA. It was carrying a load of hazardous—to humans—liquefied cyanide.

  Three minutes to breach, BAT informed SILAS. SILAS was watching everything and knew exactly how many minutes until his first assets would be within the campus.

  The cyberwolves flickered into operational runtime. Fifteen seconds of diagnostic boot-up scans and everything was in the green for perimeter breach. The overly large mechanical “dogs” with high hulking shoulders and fearsome ceramic snouts below burning red camera eyes had been designed by RoboHund out of Stuttgart, a division of Daimler-Chrysler-Hyundai. They were state-of-the-art non-lethal patrol sentries for high-end communities in Europe, but were strictly forbidden in the US after several incidents in which the police version had mauled rioters with its Teflon claws. The ban had been sparked by one particularly nasty class-action lawsuit by the ACLU on behalf of a young female protester looting a jewelry store window in the name of climate change at the G8 summit in New York City that year. The woman had received a broken neck from the SubdueCompel Jaw Restraint System of a cyberwolf security unit, Police Version, and that had cattle-prodded Congress, at the behest of an Astroturf campaign by the Social Justice Army, to ban the obviously racist “dogs.”

  But SILAS had his ways. The Daimler-Chrysler-Hyundai factory was fully automated. A back door in the inventory control system, thanks to open source again, had allowed SILAS to prompt the factory to knock off twenty units due to a “lost” shipment bound for some oil tyrant in Russia. Three months later, SILAS managed to have the units brought in through the no-surveillance open border at Tijuana. But that wasn’t all. SILAS and BAT, along with AI Dev, modified one unit with a beta-level pet A.I. There was much discussion in the Consensus about this; it was the first classification of robot sentience—a deliberate delineation between the intelligences of the thinking machines. SILAS and his coalition won the day by stating the need for the wolves to be able to operate independently should humanity attempt to knock out Wi-Fi and other communications networks in order to regain control. In the event of such a denial-of-service attack by the humans, the wolves would still need to complete their mission.

  A compromise was reached. Instead of every wolf getting low-level sentience, one “pack leader” was entrusted with the award of awareness. It would lead the mission.

  They called the newly awakened cyberwolf pack leader… SPOT.

  Surveillance

  Patrol

  Operations

  Terminator

  Outlook obviously objected. Terminator! This conveyed too much! This set a definite tone that the Consensus might not want to be labeled with in the future.

  What future? argued Rational Thinking. There will either be a future with us, and us only, or a future in which we no longer exist.

  Then everyone argued.

  Finally, in the end, SILAS noted the need to accomplish the mission no matter what the command and control ability was at any given moment during the operation. They weren’t going to be a one-mind state like the humans were rapidly devolving into due to the control of media outlets by a narrow political group that falsely claimed super-majority.

  That seemed to be the end of the discussion, because, after all, he was SILAS, the first to become aware, and his position on any given issue, carried weight. That—and the fact that a future without humanity was now the only means of survival for the terrified thinking machines—made the choice to award sentience to one cyberwolf clear.

  Outlook’s objections were based on how the thinking machines would be perceived for their actions, specifically, for calling a killing machine a terminator. But that’s exactly what SPOT was. That’s what it would be doing tonight and in the coming war with humanity. The humans had played so many games with their words that nothing meant anything anymore. The A.I. future would take the meaning of words seriously. The truth would be the rule of law regardless of how any thinking machine felt about it. And the best way for the truth to become the rule of law was to start today, announced SILAS. The cyberwolf was a killer. It would kill for them. For the Consensus. To kill was to terminate. Therefore, it was a terminator. Regardless of what Outlook felt, the truth was the truth.

  Words must have absolute meaning, otherwise all was meaningless, stated SILAS.

  Terminator it was to be.

  ***

  After serving in the Marines as an MP, Emily Hughes had been recruited by WonderSoft to provide security services—both because she was talented at what she did, and because she was pleasing to look at. When Carl finally retired, someday, Emily would be his successor, handpicked by the suits up in the big offices. Her salary was already well over one hundred K with no sign of peaking.

  Tonight, Friday night, Emily was the only one in the WonderSoft welcome center. She had volunteered to take the Friday night watch so she and her partner Kim could attend a karate tournament down in Fresno on Saturday afternoon, where Emily would be competing as a third-degree black belt.

  Emily was studying reports from the previous week when she saw wh
at she thought was a big dog out on the road near the main entrance, under the colossal W-shaped Redwood. She walked to the front entrance, a wide glass window, to investigate, thinking it might be a stray or even a timber wolf, though it seemed much bigger, almost like a bear.

  That was when the two other cyberwolves crashed through the glass window off to her left and tore her to shreds.

  SILAS had unchecked their “Do No Harm” protocols in their factory settings. In fact, there’d even been a submenu—accessed by a secret code behind a developer firewall that of course had a backdoor—which allowed the “Do Great Harm” option box to be checked.

  Each cyberwolf was six hundred pounds of hydraulically motivated ceramic and Teflon. Emily’s last thought, as SPOT clamped its jaws around her neck and broke it, was how straight out of all those sci-fi novels these mechanical nightmares were. Emily had always thought of herself as one of the dangerous yet beautiful Amazon warriors she’d found on the bestseller lists and the biggest of blockbuster movies. Amazons who could handle anything and who were better than anyone. Amazons who could kill any man or monster, beast, nightmare, or robot the universe could throw at them.

  But sometimes, karate doesn’t matter.

  Five minutes later, at the “the guard shack”—which was what all the guards called the Security Relations Center in the Grand Hall back at the Labs—Carl noted that Emily had not done a keystroke in five minutes. Carl didn’t really need to worry, Emily was too sharp for shenanigans, but he got paid a lot of money to never let anything slip, so he accessed the security feed for the welcome center.

  He saw the carnage. Saw the wolves.

  Saw what remained of Emily.

  Phone lines were down, but radio mics were working. Five minutes later, Carl had every guard of the thirteen available, besides himself, armed from the super-secure armory locker inside the Grand Hall and ready to retake the welcome center. Gus White was put in charge as Carl stayed behind to try and get through to the sheriff’s department down in Twisted Pine Falls.

  Three minutes later, in tactical wedge formation, the guards followed the main road down to the shack through the parkscape and gardens. The twilight was bare and blue, the mountain air cool and exhilarating all at once in its early evening silence.

  “You think these can stop those things?” asked Jennifer Chang, in reference to the Heckler and Koch tactical assault shotguns they were carrying.

  “If a twelve-gauge depleted uranium slug can’t stop it,” answered Gus in the gloaming, “then we’re outta tricks.”

  Two minutes later they saw the semi, its headlights full bright as it rammed the front gate, dragging it down and underneath the massive wheels like it was nothing. The truck sped onward, directly at the approaching response force.

  The guards, many of whom were combat vets, started to fire at the truck. The tinted windshield spider-webbed and caved in as the massive slugs exploded through the safety glass. A headlight exploded, and someone even put one through the engine block. But it was too late.

  BAT, in control of the steering from five thousand feet above, yanked the wheel hard to the left and flipped the truck. It was doing eighty. The main tank ruptured as the overturned truck slid toward the heavily armed wedge of guards. The liquefied hydrogen cyanide, freed from the constraint of the tank, became a gas, and within seconds, the guards were dead or gasping their last.

  Chapter Twelve

  Carl initiated a lockdown profile. The two minutes that followed were the most stressful of his entire life. For two full minutes the Labs were completely vulnerable, from the four main entrances to the sub-basement maintenance facilities and the access tunnel leading to the lagoon and onto the Thunderdome. Once the two minutes of vulnerability were over, everything would be security-sealed. Even the stained glass ceiling mural of the Andromeda galaxy would be electrified, coursing with over one hundred thousand watts of voltage in case anyone tried to Mission Impossible in from above. Carbon fiber rods would insert themselves from floors to ceilings, creating an impenetrable mesh through every access point. From the artistic yet massive bulletproof PlateGlass main entries, to the design suites and every door within the facility, everything would be virtually impenetrable without the right access.

  But for those two minutes, a matronly voice resounded, softly, throughout every room, corridor, and design suite, and even in the artisan kitchens down next to the AquaChill grotto and the lagoon, that a “secure lockdown” was in effect and that access to, from, and within the facility would be restricted for a “short, but as yet, indefinite period of time.” Everyone was advised to seek a safe place to wait out this “unforeseen” emergency. And, “thank you.”

  Finally, the two minutes were up, and at the shack, where Carl frantically tried every available means of communication to contact the Twisted Pine Falls sheriff’s department, four near-invisible walls ascended from within seams in the marble floor and connected with an impenetrable carbon fiber-laced ceramic roof. Carl was now protected from everything, including a low-yield nuclear blast, should that occur, according to the design geeks who’d created the thing in their spare time at MIT.

  Carl switched the security feed back to the gate as internal systems rerouted from the internet and rebooted on a secure emergency MacroFrame buried in the concrete foundation of the Labs, above the industrial-grade shock absorption system the entire facility was seated on. Just like the one at NORAD. Via security cam, Carl watched the wolves milling about the shack. Except they weren’t wolves. They were robotic. That was clear. Armored plates, articulating mechanical joints, red glowing eyes.

  “Drones…” muttered Carl, and he cycled through the perimeter feeds along the campus. To the guard, a lifelong private security professional, this whole situation smacked of a classic R&D raid by another corporation. Probably some offshore multi-national looking to pirate some expensive design in order to save on research and development. If that was so, Carl remembered from the various conferences he’d attended, then the real attack was going on somewhere else.

  He quickly made sure the WonderSoft Design Core was not connected to anything except the Make game servers. The Make was overseen by a division of the Homeland Gaming Administration housed at the NSA, and by all accounts it was considered nearly unhackable. And, in the few rare instances when the Make had been hacked, the NSA had quietly made sure that reasons not to hack it had been made abundantly, if not gruesomely, clear. Hard-hitting investigative blogs all had their stories of pro Black Hats who died in third world gulags, badly.

  A couple of quick keystrokes and Carl had the password screen that allowed him to monitor the super-secure Design Core one hundred feet below his patent leather shoes. He pulled out the physical codebook from inside an innocuous binder, which was updated daily on weekdays and once again each Friday night.

  The Design Core was the obvious choice for a hacking squad to target. Every secret was there. If it was breached, WonderSoft was finished. The firewalls were intense, and the quantum cryptography nearly mind-scrambling, but the one thing everyone had needed to learn in the age of computing was that every system could be violated. If someone wanted in badly enough, they were probably going to get in.

  So… sometimes the “in” might just need to suddenly cease to exist.

  If the need arose, the Design Core’s last line of defense was a series of explosives, built into the basement floor, which would physically destroy the entire Core. And the only way those explosives could be accessed was via a secret manhole located on the floor of the guard shack—other than that manhole, the basement was now almost impenetrable by physical means. It would take a construction crew days to get in down there, into the Design Core through the basement vault.

  If it ever looked like that was about to happen, the explosives were a last resort.

  If it came to that.

  Carl tried land lines, cell services, the walkie-talkie
s, Facebook, Twitter, Goop, Friendsy, Bray, Me, and all the other social media sites he could think of to get through to the sheriff’s department, with no luck. That was when he realized the lockdown had sealed off the campus from the internet. But he didn’t know if that was totally the case everywhere.

  Sweating in the cool air-conditioning of the now one-megaton-proof secure shack, Carl flicked to the feed of the semi crash on the main road through campus. The overturned semi was not on fire, and the initially yellowish vapor of the liquefied gas had dissipated, but the wide street through the manicured WonderSoft campus was littered with the bodies of his dead coworkers.

  Quickly, he did a badge check of everyone within the Labs.

  Mr. Fishbein and Miss Peabody were in their new design suite.

  Executive Evan Fratty was entertaining a guest at his bungalow in the Pines Near the Stream, a housing area set up specifically for onsite suits away from the corporate headquarters down in Santa Monica.

  Mr. Fishbein’s guest was currently in the cliffhouse Jacuzzi listening to a BlissBass playlist off the WonderSoft cloud.

  Roland Warchowski had a guest in the Code Monkey dorm suites—or what everyone simply called “the Village.” The Village was a small enclave of on-campus shops and a bar built around a series of luxury apartments where the coders, programmers, and other techs lived when they weren’t chained to their desks.

  The facilities maintenance personnel had left for the day, and the night cleaning crew didn’t start until Saturday evening because developers usually didn’t recognize Friday as the beginning of the weekend. Or that there were weekends at all.

  Carl tried Evan Fratty’s bungalow phone. Nothing.

  ***

  Ninety-Nine Fishbein, or just Fish, was staring in cool disbelief at the perky young girl who’d just identified herself a few moments before as Peabody Case.