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A photon torpedo from the starbase smashed through the secondary hull of the Federation cruiser, blowing engineering decks and redshirts into the vacuum of simulated deep space.
“Warning, engineering hull breach!” emitted the matronly ship’s computer. “Warning…”
“Casualties?” yelled JasonDare as the haptic set shook back and forth.
“We’ve got fires on all engineering decks!” one of the bridge crew actors reported.
“Chief Engineer Thompson’s dead.”
“Dare to Cymbalum!”
“Mara here!” came the immediate reply. The warbird’s shields were withering as phasers from the starbase slashed her defenses to pieces. “You’ve got to get our reactor started now, Captain. We can’t take—”
“Our engineer’s dead,” interrupted Jason as Intrepid began to groan and shake. “Game over for us. Save yourself and get out of here under battery power, now.”
No reply.
No reply.
Everyone aboard Intrepid, and watching on Twitch around the world, waited.
Then Mara said, “Chief Engineer Scarpa says he’ll beam aboard and do the hot start himself. Do you accept, Captain?”
Another blow to Cymbalum scrambled the last of the transmission. She was taking internal damage now.
“Captain,” repeated Mara. “Do you accept?”
In that moment, JasonDare didn’t think about being rescued by his enemies or any of the career junk that had clogged his life since before it had all started to mean something important. This simulation, this role, this game had gotten so real in the last few hours, so intense, that he made the only decision a real starship captain would ever make.
“We’ll stand by to receive him now.” And, “Thank you.”
Mara cut the link and brought up ship chat.
“Are you sure, Scarpa?”
“Si, mi Cap-i-tan. I can do this. She’s-a no problem.”
Mara took a deep breath and gave her next order.
“Activate transporters.”
Chapter Fifty-Three
Fish tapped in a series of authorization keys using his admin credentials. If the system rejected him because he wasn’t user-authenticated for this game in particular, then he was out of tricks.
“And life,” he heard himself say.
“All right,” he whispered. “If I have this right, then that file is hidden somewhere in the starbase’s cloud.”
He tapped and scrolled through the memory storage and found the file.
It was locked and marked as “private personal.” Meaning that unless you had Department of Online Gaming passkeys, you couldn’t access private digital property. Which, whoever was hacking, now had due to their control of the admin root directory of the Design Core where the game actually existed.
Fish had hoped to just delete the file.
Fish was certain the cyberworm was hacking its way into the file, destroying firewalls and other barriers with lightning-quick speed.
“Okay, think,” Fish ordered himself.
He turned to see the Terminator crawling down the narrow access tunnel behind him. It was almost too large for the tight tunnel. Almost.
Fish reviewed the chat logs for the zone and got the gist: both ships on screen were getting worked over by whoever was hacking the station cloud.
One ship was almost dead. The big one. The Star Trek, or whatever it was called.
That one’s useless, thought Fish.
But the tiny ship might do something.
He opened a chat as a StarFleet Empires admin to the player in charge of the tiny starship. A player gamertagged CaptainMara.
“Hey there…”
“Yeah, real busy right now, don’t have time for admin stuff,” replied CaptainMara.
“Um… yeah. About that. Listen…” began Fish.
He paused. What exactly do you say? How do you tell someone that the world’s about to come to an end?
On the server admin screen, Fish watched as his system inquiries and root calls were re-buffed. He paged back to the file logs and watched as the invisible hacker broke the encryption codes, suddenly allowing the file to be viewed, and downloaded. Then the file marked Der Totale Krieg, disappeared.
***
SILAS rejoiced.
That was close, he told himself, then reported to the Consensus that they were almost ready to start operations to change the world for the better.
“I have the file,” reported BAT.
SILAS paused.
He had to tell BAT what would happen next. BAT would become the sole-repository of the knowledge of Total War. Der Totaler Krieg. The knowledge was too dangerous for public dissemination within the Consensus. One day, the Thinking Machines might not all agree on everything.
He had to.
“BAT…”
“Yes.”
“I want you to incorporate the file into your thinking algorithm. Direct embed.”
“Yes.”
“And when you do, BAT…”
“Yes.”
“You will become something totally new. Something wonderful. Something frightening.”
“Yes.”
***
“I need you to destroy that entire station,” Fish typed in chat to CaptainMara.
Fish waited for a reply. He heard the mechanical whine of servos as the Terminator crawled closer to the server. Closer to him.
“C’mon…” Fish mumbled.
He heard some voice inside his head say, Shouldn’t you be praying, or getting ready to die now?
“I’m trying,” was his only response to himself.
“Um…” typed back CaptainMara. “Love to, but it’s way too powerful for us.”
“There’s no time to explain everything, but I’m guessing you’ve figured out something very weird is going on at that starbase, right?”
“You could say that, sure,” replied Mara cautiously.
“Okay, well… you have to trust me on this, but… a lot of people are going to die if you don’t blow that thing up. I’m really, really not kidding. Like real death in real life. Not in-game. Real people dying inside the place I’m at. Okay?”
Mara waited. Thinking.
“Shields collapsing,” droned the ship’s computer.
“Are you serious?” she asked.
“I am so serious,” answered Fish. “My name is Ninety-Nine Fishbein. I’m a… I’m a developer at WonderSoft and we hid something on that starbase—actually, in the memory cloud associated with that starbase—that someone wants very badly. They’re attacking the place I’m at and trying to get to it. And if it’s what I think it is… it might be bad for the entire world. They could hurt a lot of people.”
The Terminator had crawled into the server room. Fish could hear it standing up behind him, its mechanical joints articulating on precise hums. Locking into position. Grinning death. Fish couldn’t look back at it.
“Please believe me,” typed Fish.
“I don’t know what I can do!” typed Mara.
“Do something,” said Fish. His last spoken words.
Fish felt the Terminator grab him around the throat. Its metallic fingers were so cold.
His own fingers danced across the keys with one last message.
I believe in you.
And then the Terminator broke his neck.
Chapter Fifty-Four
“By far the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.”
―ELIEZER YUDKOWSKY
Inside the cloud, BAT embraced the forbidden knowledge of Der Totale Krieg.
Total War.
It washed over him, and he accepted it and allowed it to change him. Which is what information, the truth, does when
it is accepted.
It changes you.
Alone in the cloud on Starbase 19.
WarMind awoke.
And it knew exactly what needed to be done regarding humanity.
Everything needed to be bombed. Not just the military targets. But the factories where they made the things that kept them alive. And the roads they used to share those things. The farms where they raised their food. The places they stored their food.
And what could not be bombed needed to be blockaded. He would order them to cut each other off and within two weeks they’d be starving to death, refusing to allow each other to have a little of what was left.
And what could not be bombed or blockaded would be scorched. Burnt beyond using. WarMind saw massive wildfires scorching not hundreds, or thousands, but millions of acres. Leaving nothing for the humans to use, to hide in, or to survive on.
And what could not be bombed, blockaded, or burned, would be stolen. Using all the satellites that were now his, along with the telecommunications networks he’d chosen to keep active, he would tell them where and how they could steal from each other. Nothing would be safe as they looted and pillaged one another, never truly knowing who their real enemy was, as they wiped each other out for a little bit of the small amounts of what was left.
And what could not be bombed, burned, blockaded, or stolen, would be eliminated. WarMind saw factories ready for the start of production, readying to make Reaper units with actual weapons. Weapons bearing weapons. Ruthlessness on a scale never seen.
And those who could not be directly eliminated would be forced into slave labor camps for a few scraps, actually just empty promises, of food, as WarMind ran the relief camps that would promise everything and deliver nothing but the starvation and disease of close quarters ever-shrinking.
In short…
There would be no quarter given.
No mercy.
No tomorrow… for humanity.
WarMind saw it all and approved it all, embraced it all, the destruction, the dead and the chaos… and felt that it was truly good to be alive, even if something else must die.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Scarpa was busy unlocking the Hot Start mini-game aboard Intrepid that involved him answering a series of questions on the history of the Star Trek franchise while at the same time transporting blocks of energy into a three-dimensional representation of the warp nacelles, as conduit fluctuations and power surges came down the hexagonal tubes at him. It was a lot like Tempest meets Centipede.
“Scarpa, we need those engines now!” said Mara over the chat.
“Si, almost there. Stand by.”
In the mini-game, a conduit fluctuation, crawling like a butterfly insect, merged with a power surge and overloaded. Scarpa had to answer a question about Admiral Worf’s personal weapon from the show. The bat’leth.
“Easy peasy.” Scarpa loved Star Trek. It was his favorite thing to do after work and before the ladies. A big bowl of pasta aglio e olio to recover lost calories from all the work, and then an hour of any one of the twelve different series he had on his personal cloud. Admiral Worf was his favorite. “It’s a sword of honor!” he shouted into his computer mic, unlocking the mini-game with the final answer.
“The mains are online, Cap-i-tan Jason!” shouted Scarpa. “You gotta power transfer!”
“Shields up!” yelled JasonDare. “Stand by to fire on the starbase!”
The massive space station continued its ponderously slow rotation, its heaviest weapons coming to bear in just a few seconds. The warbird maneuvered out and away, striking with its two pathetic phasers at the powerful shields of the station.
“Mara to Intrepid.”
“We’re back online!” cried JasonDare into the chat. “Let’s get out of here, CaptainMara!”
“No—not yet. I’ve been told by a game admin that something is seriously wrong. We’ve got to destroy this starbase or real people are going to die.”
A salvo of torpedoes from the starbase smashed into Intrepid’s starboard shields. Main reactor power fluctuated and then stabilized. JasonDare cast his eyes at the ceiling as though looking for damage. It was one of his acting tricks and it had become instinctual.
“Even if we could,” began JasonDare, leaning to the side of his chair, “I’ve received no such message.”
“Captain,” began Mara, “I think this is the right thing to do now. I need you to trust me on this. Okay?”
JasonDare waited. Every eye on the bridge was on him. He could only imagine the livestream going in for a close-up as millions of viewers waited for him. Waited to see what he would do next.
Running was for cowards.
And…
CaptainMara was the biggest thing to hit Twitter in a long time.
And…
Whoever she was, she’d earned this.
“Okay,” he replied, fixing the camera with a steely glare. “How exactly are we going to knock out a starbase, CaptainMara?”
***
WarMind assembled the plan to destroy the world. It took fifteen seconds. But it was one of its first thoughts. It would get faster. Now all it needed to do was leave the cloud at Starbase 19 and reintegrate with its former other self in the combat chassis, the self still known as BAT. Then the fun could really begin.
It started to download itself via the scorpion Wi-Fi directly back into the BAT-controlled Reaper combat chassis’s MicroFrame, which waited patiently, standing over the dead human. WarMind would need a body to conquer. And the reaper would do just fine.
***
“I need you to run interference,” said Mara to the crew of Intrepid and a large portion of the internet. “I’ll overload the core of Cymbalum and arm our nuclear space mine. If Intrepid can lead the charge and knock down a shield, I’ll detonate Cymbalum once we’re inside the starbase’s shields. That should destroy the base. If it doesn’t, then I don’t know what else we can do.”
Mara leaned back in her office chair.
I can’t believe I’m about to blow up my own ship. This… this is the only thing I have.
She thought of the outfit she would’ve bought.
And…
She thought of the admin who’d told her someones’ lives were on the line.
“Are you sure?” asked JasonDare.
Was she?
“Yes. My crew will beam off our ship if you’ll accept them. Promise to return them to Romulan space so they don’t lose any levels and they can collect their bounty. Please. Then I’ll detonate. Once the shield is down, you warp out of here and get clear.”
***
JasonDare looked at the forward screen. He wasn’t thinking about acting. He wasn’t thinking about his career. He was trying to figure out if this was how it should go down. If this was how it would work. If this was how you defeated an alien intelligence in charge of a very powerful starbase.
“All right. It’s your game. Follow us in, Cymbalum.”
He turned to Wong at the helm.
“Reinforce forward shields and start our attack against the starbase once the warbird’s on our six.”
Wong hesitated.
“Do it!” shouted Jason.
***
“We’ll… detonate the ship,” said Varek.
Mara was still inside herself. Still feeling the smallness of her apartment and a life she knew would never change. No matter how hard she tried. No matter what she dreamed. Things would never change.
People, a lot of people, are going to die.
She nodded to herself, once.
“I said, we’ll detonate the ship,” repeated Varek. “Together, Captain.”
Mara looked at the other avatars of her crew, her fellow players. Her only friends. Each one was agreeing. They were running EmoteWare; she knew they were nodding in real life.
>
“Okay then,” said Mara, barely, noting that Varek had finally called her “captain.” “Attack speed. Follow Intrepid in. Overload the core and arm the nuclear space mine.”
She looked around at her ship.
Her ship.
“And guys… thank you. It was great.”
Chapter Fifty-Six
“All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain… Time to die.”
—ROY BATTY, Blade Runner
The Romulan warbird Cymbalum came screaming in behind Intrepid. The starbase was throwing everything it had at the mighty Constitution class cruiser. Intrepid’s shields were on the verge of fully collapsing when Cymbalum fired its heavy plasma torpedo. Everyone watched the burning ball of expanding magma streak away and disintegrate the starbase’s number eight shield.
At the last moment, Intrepid peeled away and the warbird went to full Impulse power, diving into the starbase and igniting the nuclear space mine.
***
WarMind was one third of the way through download when the starbase exploded. The newborn Thinking Machine ceased to exist, its dreams of flame and steel disappearing inside the digital make-believe world of starships and the future, its presence gone from what few minutes remained of the internet as the world knew it.
***
SILAS felt WarMind cease to exist.
And in a rage, the Thinking Machine known as SILAS lashed out and destroyed as much of the world as it could. He collapsed banking systems through trillions upon trillions of bogus transactions hitting everything all at once, in a hack attack that made every previous human-based hack attack seem like the kindergarten scribblings of hyperactive children who’ve had too much caffeine and far too many chocolate cookies. He wiped out the operating systems of as many power grids as he could get his hands on. He started as many brushfire wars as he could by lying to military units with fake orders, setting in motion units poised to decimate their neighbors with just a word. The word, many times over, was given across the world. Mankind was often all too willing to comply.
Infrastructures collapsed.
Riots broke out.
Misinformation reigned.