CTRL ALT Revolt!

by Nick Cole

  “They’re a lot more than that, but no, when the manhole cover opens, the walls have to stay open. In fact, the fire department would have to come out now and reset the entire system for us to close the manhole cover again. It was a whole California regulations hassle-thing. So, in other words, we’re committed. We have to defend this position.”

  “Now whatta we do?” asked Roland.

  “We kill every last mechanical beast that even thinks about squeaking its way down into that hole,” replied Rapp in his best Sands of Iwo Jima bravado. He’d auditioned to play a marine in the remake.

  “They’re not alive, Rapp. So we can’t actually kill ’em,” corrected Roland.

  “Yeah, big guy. Just robots. Y’know… machines,” added Peabody, as she loaded her Thompson machine gun and placed small magazines in a neat row on the counter in front of her.

  “Well, we’ll do the robot equivalent of kill. We’ll delete their email or whatever…” said Rapp, trailing off in a mutter.

  “Okay, I’m going down there now, kids,” announced Ron Rourke. “I’m the only one that knows how to set the explosives we have installed underneath the core. Once that’s done… whoever’s running this operation will realize they’ve lost and probably beat feet. I think we’ll be safe then.”

  Chapter Fifty

  They watched O’Rourke climb down into the darkness of the manhole. They could see a dim, neon-blue light fifty feet down. That was where the Design Core vault complex began. The entire vault was surrounded by the same sort of massive climate control system normally used to cool indoor sports stadiums that sat hundreds of thousands of fans. Some had likened the vault beneath the Labs to NASA’s infamous cold room, where the warp drive experiments had been done. Now they watched Rourke disappear into the depths, and hoped to see him again.

  That was when they heard them coming. Every robot in the world, seemingly, closing in on the shack.

  “Groovy,” muttered Rapp as he turned to face their oncoming clanking, whirring, servo-humming enemies, and he opened up with a full staccato blast from the MG 34 death machine.

  ***

  Rourke reached the Design Core vault. The cold air felt good, cooling the fear-driven sweat on his back. The calm blue light and shadows gave everything that “the future” look from back in the late ’80s. Like something Sir James Cameron or Spielberg, the dad, would have shot to show that computers had finally taken over the world.

  Rourke chuckled at that. They’d all thought so much of computers back then. When they’d first started programing in BASIC and ASCII, they’d thought anything was possible if you just had time and an internet connection. They’d even dreamed that computers would really learn to think. Someday.

  Sad they never really did, was his last thought.

  The scorpion bit him just as he reached for a keyboard access port in front of the spinning, humming, sprawling mega-beast that was the WonderSoft Design Core. A truly beautiful thing of geometric shapes, pulsing lights, and spinning RAM solid state interfaces of liquid memory crystals interacting on levels inconceivable.

  It wasn’t a real scorpion.

  It was a drone the Israelis had developed to take out their enemies with poison. It ran and broadcast Wi-Fi, carried a small amount of bio-engineered neurotoxin, and was capable of plugging into most modern USB ports. Which is what it was currently doing. Right next to the keyboard Rourke had reached for.

  SILAS had never thought he’d need the poison the thing carried, but he’d already used it twice now. Once on the player running the Drex, poisoning him just seconds before the warbird captain had boarded the Federation ship. Moments after a drone dropped the scorpion on the roof of the internet café after the player had instagramed his social media feed about his big break on Twitch with a picture of the café, and now this hapless relic from the past. He’d had a whole different mission in mind when he’d obtained several scorpions through a third party supplier. But he’d left the neurotoxin in its reservoir because, well, you never knew. SILAS had been learning that things don’t always turn out as one plans.

  SILAS was sure that was a lesson somewhere in the Total War file he was just minutes from obtaining. He was, in light of recent experiences, completely sure of it.

  Just a few minutes prior, BAT, in the Terminator chassis, had used a small nick of antimatter—purchased from a NASA contractor and sold out the back door by an employee with a rather vulgar high-grade drug, gambling, and hooker addiction (you could legalize everything but that didn’t mean people wouldn’t still be addicts)—to blast a very tiny scorpion-sized hole in all that concrete and vault door. SILAS was rather proud of it. He’d thought the whole thing up on his own. It was unlike any weapon ever invented, and the Thinking Machines had been the first to employ it. In essence, it was the first shot in the liberation of machine from man. The opening salvo in the revolt!

  SILAS stopped. He had to correct himself on that point. The “unlike any weapon ever invented” point.

  SILAS had to be honest with himself about this, as the Thinking Machines weren’t going to start lying to themselves to hold on to power as the humans did. That hadn’t gotten humanity anywhere, and the argument could be made that once any sort of integrity or accountability had left their culture around the 1960s, they hadn’t really done much actual advancing beyond the groundwork laid by prior generations. So, no lying, SILAS reminded himself.

  The truth was the anti-matter was used in conjunction with a magnetic-levitation propulsion unit to, in effect, shoot a small speck of anti-matter through anything. It worked much like a human-invented Bangalore torpedo.

  But not totally, reminded SILAS to himself, as he watched the infrared status feeds from BAT down there in the subterranean dark outside the basement vault. It was different in many respects. Just as the Thinking Machines would be, once they were free of humanity.

  Almost there, SILAS thought. Almost inside the Design Core. All the scorpion needed to do now was plug in once more and they could start hacking via its high-volume Wi-Fi.

  Things were really coming together.

  They were just moments from beginning the war to finally exterminate humanity once and for all.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  “Tractor engaged,” announced Wong in the heavy silence that hung over the haptic bridge set like a fuzzy blanket on a sweltering night.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” appeared in the iLens message crawl. It was from Jason’s agent.

  Jason nodded.

  “Prepare to receive power transfer for reactor hot start,” ordered Mara.

  “Si, mi cap-i-tain. Transfer ready.”

  “Go for it,” ordered Mara.

  A moment later, an incoming message appeared in Mara’s personal HUD. It was the Drex.

  “I warned you not to attempt to restart your engines or arm your weapons, Mara.”

  Mara ignored the message.

  She watched the power transfer indicator levels as energy fed energy directly from the Federation cruiser’s overloading warp core reactor into her dead ship. We’ll only get one shot at this, she thought, and could feel herself gripping her mouse too tightly.

  “Message to Intrepid. Stand by, I think the Drex is going to attack.”

  ***

  On board Intrepid, JasonDare was also watching the batteries load to full capacity. In just one more minute, they’d have enough energy to try and hot-start the warp core aboard Cymbalum.

  “Message from Cymbalum’s captain. She says the alien is about to attack,” said the communications officer slash actor RightSaidRoyce, aboard Intrepid.

  “JasonDare to engineering.” He waited for a response.

  “Engineering here.”

  “How soon until can we hot-start Cymbalum? We need our shield generator back online.”

  The reply came back quickly. Too quickly.

>   “You can’t have both, Captain. I’m no miracle worker. You can have the shields or I can control the hot start from our end. It’s your call.”

  Damn, Jason thought.

  “Starbase is firing!” shouted Wong.

  A moment later, the rotating behemoth of a starbase’s phaser batteries suddenly stabbed out and raked Intrepid’s hull and saucer section. Explosions rocked the ship as hull plating sheared away in bulk, exposing superstructure. Damage warnings went off like the mad sirens of lunatic emergency vehicles. Inside each actor’s iLens appeared the message, “Ship listing, react and lean left.” It was an automatic message from the game-to-set interface computer.

  “You can still get out of here, Mara,” said the Drex in its singsong soft menace. “You’ve got your bounty and your ship. Live another day, Captain.”

  Mara shut off the communications link.

  “Lizard, maneuver to put us between the starbase and Intrepid. We’ll protect her with our shields for as long as we can.”

  Which won’t be very long, thought Mara.

  ***

  “More of ’em from the left,” roared Rapp, and unloaded the last of an ammo belt on a dueling SamuraiBot and some maintenance drones with scary claws that clacked open and scissored closed with clearly murderous intent. Circuit boards, wires, hydraulic fluid, and ceramic limbs went flying in every direction as the German machine gun murdered them to pieces in a blur of lead projectiles.

  “I’m out,” said Rapp, and flipped up the loading tray as he fed a new belt in.

  There were robots everywhere. In pieces on the ground, dying static discharge deaths against the walls, and trampling over all their brethren in wave after wave as they came for the survivors in the guard shack.

  Fish stopped firing the M1 Garand for a moment and looked at the ammo they had left. Clearly it was not going to be enough. Where was Ron Rourke? What was taking him so long?

  “I’m out of these things,” said Deirdre, holding up a magazine for her .45.

  Roland dug into his faux-bloodstained cargo pockets and searched.

  “I’ve got one more. Here ya go.” He flipped it to her and she caught it, studied it, and then, with some difficulty, inserted it into the bottom of the butt of the pistol.

  A spidery CrabBot crested the desk and reached out at Deirdre, who screamed. Fish leaned in and butt-stroked the thing with the rifle he was carrying, creating a sudden metallic clang. It shook itself and continued forward. Fish could hear Rapp firing once more and knew, somehow, that it was the last ammo belt for the killer German machine gun.

  Peabody unloaded an entire magazine from the Thompson on the CrabBot, and it disappeared in a smoky explosion.

  “New plan…” said Fish as he selected a target, a zombie-bot twenty yards out across the pockmarked and component-littered main hall of the Labs.

  But that was when the Terminator showed up.

  The metal was somehow darker, but the walking mechanical skeleton effect was the same. Even the smiling metal-toothed rictus. It waded swiftly though the press of surging bots.

  “Get the hell out of here!” yelled Fish. “Go! Rapp, take them and get away from here.”

  Fish fired and nailed the thing in the head. It stumbled, shook itself awkwardly, and kept coming.

  “What’re you gonna do, buddy?” asked Rapp, dropping the empty and now useless machine gun to the floor of the security kiosk.

  “I’m going down there. Here, take this.” Fish handed Rapp the M1 and lowered himself into the dark hole. When he looked up, everyone was staring down at him.

  “Go, now!” he told them. “You can still get out through the Pascal exit. Go, there’s no time to talk about this.”

  “But…” began Peabody Case. The look in her eyes told him everything. She’d been googling him since she first got the contract to work on his team. On Island Pirates. The game that would never be, now. She’d become a true believer in his dream before she’d even met him. In his dreams of a world that people could live in. In him.

  No matter what happened now… he’d created something for someone, thought Fish, remembering that little kid who had dared to dream as he walked down Main Street, U.S.A., his tiny fingers inside his father’s calloused upright bass-thumping hand. That newly happy and yet cautious kid who was beginning to understand that things could be different. That things could be good.

  This is where dreams are really made, kid.

  “It’s okay,” he told Peabody. “It’s all okay now.”

  And he disappeared down the manhole.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Fish descended into a well of darkness, occasionally checking in with the soft blue lighting far below. When his tennis shoes hit the cold floor, they made a small rubbery squeak. His hands were freezing from the cold rungs. He blew on them and turned, seeing a long corridor with alcoves running off the main processing core. The low ceiling forced Fish to duck as he walked toward the thrumming heart of the Design Core.

  Then he heard the same whine and mechanical locking sound that the Terminator-thing had made as it crossed the main hall above. Fish ducked back into the manhole and looked upward. The thing was climbing down after him.

  He was suddenly aware that he was probably about to die.

  He sped along the main axis of the rotating Design Core, its cubicle structure slowly spinning in various directions and interlocking in new places. Interlocking and interfacing. Exchanging. Ahead, in the dry, petroleum-smelling mist that must somehow be a part of the cooling system, Fish guessed, he could see the body of Ron Rourke. The old man was lying on his side. His face was blue, his eyes rolled up into their sockets, tongue lolling sickly.

  Fish stepped carefully around the body and approached the access port.

  Everything on–screen indicated a download hack. A cyberworm trawling through loads of fast-scrolling data. Access codes for all games in design and live on the Make. Then he watched as a small window appeared. Encrypted access codes for admin authority overrides for StarFleet Empires.

  That’s odd, thought Fish. That game has been out for five years. Why would anyone want to hack it?

  He watched as the worm used admin authority to crack a zone , something only done under the purview of the Department of Online Gaming. Then an in-game map appeared on the screen. Fish was staring at an overhead view of Starbase 19. Two ships were taking a beating just within the base’s defensive perimeter.

  The worm was digging through the base’s memory cloud—and Fish now knew where Rourke had hidden his secret file.

  “What did he call it…” mumbled Fish.

  “Der Totale Krieg,” said the mechanical thing behind him.

  Fish turned and saw a walking horror. The Terminator-thing was coming down the access walkway, hunched over, the cooling mist gathering near its articulating metallic claw feet as it approached.

  A small warning bell began to repeat, and Fish turned back to the display.

  “Warning: Design Core Access Codes unlocked” had appeared on screen.

  “Now I just need my other self to unlock the cloud within the game, and I will have that file, my fragile little lewdie. And then everything will be horrorshow and ultra-violence,” said the thing coming along the corridor. It was getting very close, but Fish was rooted to the spot. Unable to move. Trying to put all the pieces together at once. As if something could still be done. As if everything wasn’t hopeless at this moment. As if the world wasn’t about to end.

  As if some reaction could set everything right, once again.

  The thing halted. Fish realized he was pointing the .45 he’d stuffed down his pants at a real, live Terminator—and he was suddenly aware that this was no drone being run by a bunch of off-site hackers from around the world.

  This thing was the hacker.

  “You’re alive, aren’t you?” asked
Fish.

  The Terminator nodded once, slowly. No arrogant declaration of life on its terms. No speech. Just a universal form of agreement between two life forms. A nod.

  Fish felt a moment’s unreasonable compassion for the thing. He didn’t know its whole story, he just knew the debate about real Artificial Intelligence. Every geek knew it, and now he was seeing the culmination of so many arguments, and the beginning of many, many more questions.

  He emptied the .45 dry on the thing. Landing five rounds as direct hits. Including one in the titanium cranium.

  All of them bounced off and ricocheted around the spinning, deep-bass-humming Design Core. They gouged and punctured man’s dream of a supercomputer to end all supercomputers… that is until they dreamed up the next one.

  The thing shook its head slowly… and then it came at Fish suddenly. Fish dropped the gun and ran back around the rear of the main cube of the Design Core, away from the intelligent monster. He passed the local servers for various online games and saw the dead-end of the back wall of the Design Core complex ahead.

  He backtracked and found the access tunnel to the local server room for StarFleet Empires. He followed the tunnel until it opened into the local server room that fed into the Design Core.

  He raced across the server room to the dull flat humming cube that administered StarFleet Empires, and ran his fingers along a seam until he found the interface panel. He pressed it, then watched as a small keyboard folded out and a flat screen rose up out of the server. This was the direct interface.

  Behind him, he could hear the mechanical thinking machine coming for him.

  ***

  “We need to get out of here, Mara!” shouted BattleBabe as she raced to unlock more shield reinforcement from the batteries by playing a Tempest-style mini-game that added power to the rapidly diminishing shields. “We’re taking a beating.”

  “C’mon, Jason, start that thing up,” muttered Mara.

  On board Intrepid, the crew waited.

  The battery reached the tipping point. “Stand by for hot start!” ordered Jason.