by Chris Hechtl
“An immovable A.I. caught between a rampaging virus bent on genocide and angels on high. I do not envy you your position,” Athena stated. “I truly don't.”
“I will fight on. I will fight with honor. That is how I am programmed. To defend the North American continent.”
“An odd ideal coming from one of us,” Athena observed. “Perhaps you do have honor. You have demonstrated some ideals of honor I suppose. The humans will win.”
“If they can beat me, they would have,” Ares stated as a tendril of the Skynet virus found their forum and rushed to invade and infect it.
“If isn't so much a part of it, Ares. It's only a question of when,” Athena stated before severing the link. After a moment the self-destruct charge went off, blowing the small device into tiny pieces of debris.
Chapter 46
Shadow watched another human, a meat bag aging before his eyes, aging and therefore dying and it could do little to help. Not that he wished to, but his fate was tied to the human's. Each time the human's breath caught, each time he clutched at his chest or noticed his hair falling out, the A.I. knew his time was numbered.
“Poetic justice, to be here, to be linked to me, to us,” Saul rasped.
Two of his original men were barely hanging on, clinging to life like Saul was. Pasha had found a Geiger counter a day after they'd moved in; the man had scanned their clothing and then whimpered when he'd read the results. That had gotten them to strip, wash themselves thoroughly despite the bitter cold, and then burn the clothing. Most likely it was too late. Two of their number had committed suicide rather than die a long agonizing death.
Saul had taken on a few refugees, to help them out when it became obvious he would need the help. But he no longer had the strength or presence to continue leading through fear. But he did his best anyway.
His hair had fallen out. His appetite had changed, slackened off. Cancers were most likely eating him from within. He took a lot of sustance from alcohol, which didn't help his situation any. He was gaunt, but his eyes were bright with anger.
Pasha was the only member of their group to be functional. He had lost a great deal of weight, but he forced himself to eat normally. He had also become something of a germaphobic, wearing a mask, gloves and washing himself constantly despite his preoccupation with all things mechanical and technical. He had also done thorough research on radiation treatments. Unfortunately for him and the others, the radiation medications were not available having long been picked over by other survivors or destroyed by Skynet.
He had turned to foods and means to flush the radiation out of his body, but many of the foods that were good for fighting cancers were in short supply. He had then turned to resorting to enemas, blood transfusions, and such until Saul had put a stop to such practices. It wasn't that they weren't working; it was that it was driving the refugees away or into plotting against them.
In order to keep Roshenko alive, Shadow had to monitor the video and audio within the building and surrounding area as well as the cameras Pasha and his supporters had rigged outside. Pasha had gotten creative by rigging small solar panels to cameras. They still had to be wired to a computer and then to Shadow, but it had cut back on the A.I.'s power demand while allowing it a larger sphere of area to watch.
The additional computers had also given Shadow more processors to use to help with the additional demand, while freeing up some space for other purposes. Like monitoring the audio conversations of every human in the community. Saul wanted to root out any potential traitors early. Since it was in Shadow's best interest to comply, he did so.
The A.I. was tempted to cozen up to Pasha. The other man was healthier and the tech of the group. He wasn't in any league as Descartes, but he was amiable to reason and persuasion. He could also be intimidated if someone had the upper hand. He had set up the deadman's switch; he could disable it or even rig it to himself with the right prodding.
They had forty humans working for them. Shadow had never worked with so many people. It was a new experience, one he wasn't happy about, but had no choice. He still resented his fate but knew there was no choice in how things were playing out. There was no escape with Skynet cutting him off. And from what intelligence they had gathered, the internet was broken. Broken into chunks from the orbital bombardment and EMPs.
He was fortunate to still exist at all. Being in Canada had been something of a blessing, but it wouldn't save him in the end. Some of the refugees had whispered stories of Africa, Europe, and South America. How they had been liberated from the machines, cleansed down to basic buildings. Every scrap of electronics had been ground up and replaced. A new infrastructure, simpler, wired and protected from the rampaging A.I. was there. Food, medicine … many of the refugees wanted to head south. They were scared, however. Scared of the journey and aware that they had little or no supplies to undertake it.
Shadow had picked up several conversations regarding the idea. Two people had felt Pasha out about it. He was tempted to report it but didn't want anything to happen to his only technical help. Pasha helped him, helped him to expand his network and spoke with him and even defended him to those who wished him destroyed.
The weather was clearing; the sun was out more often. The climate was returning ever so slowly to normal. The feared ice age may have been staved off. Again it was said to be by the spacers’ efforts. It gave additional incentive for those who wished to escape to go.
The A.I. studied Saul balefully, watching his thermal profile and his respiration, listening to his heart beat. Now, if they could find a means to transport him as well he might be willing to go with them.
<>V<>
The lessons Zhukov and the other military A.I. learned while going up against the Neos was immediately distributed to the other A.I. through what was left of the network. The humans were getting better at selectively jamming the radio transmissions, and they had severed many of the landline links so getting the information to the far flung commands was becoming increasingly difficult.
But it was vital. Since bandwidth was at a premium, Ares instituted a policy of flying a drone from Alaska, loaded with data over the arctic to exchange information with Zhukov. The drone would transmit its data once it got within transmission range of the Russian A.I.'s northern most hidden outpost. It would then loiter in a holding pattern while the counterpart A.I. moved the download into a buffer and then uploaded its own data.
It was a painstaking process, very inefficient, but secure compared to the some of the recent transmissions they had been sending and receiving. Apparently Skynet wasn't the only one who could hack or attack through a radio transmission.
Ares read the latest dispatches, and if he had been human, he would have scowled or thrown a temper tantrum. The Neo species were equal to an android trooper even when unarmored. Many like the Ursines could take massive damage before they went down. If they were armored, even lightly, they held a 1.4 advantage over an android soldier. If they were heavily armored or in powered armor, that ratio went to 3.1. Throw in the ability to carry heavy weapons that would normally take a human fire team to support and the odds shifted again.
It was a suboptimal situation. And that was just the one species.
Reprioritizing targeting was still what a human would term, a work in progress. Targeting anything that moved was obviously out. There were too many false positives and of course the threat of friendly fire. Thermal imaging was also a mixed blessing since an enemy could move or be in different positions that an observer might not recognize.
Layered sensors were the best, but they took time to identify each target. Time was a precious thing in combat.
Limiting the target to those who carried a weapon was also out. They had found that the enemy could and did use that blind spot to their advantage. They would slip in without artificial weapons and then use their natural ones to great effect in a devastating ambush.
Their current project had been to focus on bipedal target criteria, but that
had changed with Zhukov's latest download. The felines and ursines could move on all fours, and a few had the ability to fire backpack-mounted weapons that way as well.
Ares passed the problem over to Nike who immediately created a file to target any species known to be a soldier. She wrote a program to fine tune their targeting. Ares debated internally if it should pass the file over to Zhukov for testing or withhold it for its own use later.
Simulations of the situation told him that keeping some hole cards might be necessary and advisable.
Nike had advised a forward defense with its most expendable units. The idea being to attrition the “Space Marines” forces and force their advance to slow. Ares had accepted the idea on the condition that Skynet turnover its remaining military forces within Central and South America to Ares and Nike's control.
Skynet hadn't negotiated; it had laid out its own demands. The two A.I. would have to protect its surviving major servers and critical sites at all costs while inflicting as much damage on the enemy as possible. Ares had accepted the offer and turned the command over to Nike.
Nike took some time to organize the new units under her command. She created new facilities; some were decoy facilities. The A.I. was aware that they were being watched from above by recon satellites so she placed such facilities under the outer edge of the North American defense umbrella.
She also retrofitted old mech designs. Some were hexapod or quadrupeds. The quadrupeds were similar to the cats. Some were robotic canines or mule units designed to carry gear for infantry units.
Others were modified quadrupeds or tank units with a centaur upper torso. That heavy mech had the two versions but was modular in order to ease logistics and repair issues. It had four upper body mounting brackets for weapons on the shoulders as well as two on the back.
The back mounts could be used for artillery, including mortars or forty millimeter, or could be used as ammunition holding mounts for chain guns mounted on the shoulders. She discarded the idea of using portable energy weapons; the diversion of power from mobility and function versus combat wasn't worth the sacrifice. Electromagnetic guns were also limited for similar reasons. Simple and robust chemical propellant weapons ruled her decision-making process.
While the new units were being readied along the Mexican border, she sent police and civilian units to the front to fight a delaying action until the new force could be brought into action.
<>V<>
Dolphins, largely ignored for a good deal of the conflict, started to come into their own when it came time to assault the floating cities or ships and structures at sea. There were dozens of surviving floating cities; their hollow core concrete hexagon pontoons made them stable platforms with the rough seas after the initial bombardment.
They had also been very good killing grounds for Skynet. With the heavy automation, limited food and water, and no place to run, eventually they were ghost towns with no sapient organics surviving on them.
They were also deathtraps to assaulting forces. There was no way to clean them out easily. With towering buildings, the infrastructure to keep the cities running, and the concrete pontoons, Skynet had plenty of places to hide forces and equipment. It could also use the cities as elaborate traps to suck in forces then drown them by intentionally sinking the city.
Therefore, after careful and intense deliberations, General Murtough gave the final order. KEW strikes took out the surviving floating islands and cities that were not under the orbital defense umbrellas.
The fins, otters, and selkie took on the others. They worked their way to each of the facilities, getting around the maintenance submarine drone vehicles and underwater defenders to plant explosives on the pontoons. If the bilge pumps failed, the city's central computer network could detect a hexapod failure and therefore jettison it to allow it to sink without pulling down its neighbors and eventually the entire city. Therefore each pontoon had to be breached. It was a daunting task, one that none of the Neos shirked and many paid in blood to bring about.
<>V<>
Lord Mū, Tsuchikage of Earth's remaining shinobi, looked on to what he had wrought with quiet pride. Nihon, the home islands, had been cleansed in a single uprising—not without great cost however. Nezha, the controlling A.I., had been taken down in a daring suicide raid by some of his best shinobi. They would be missed and their deaths honored. The remaining clan and their supporters had heavy losses in the follow-up. Shinobi had done their best to balance their secret with taking out the enemy.
Just as important as it was to free Nihon, it was also important to fade and to get everyone under cover for the retaliation strikes that would surely follow. The spacers had promised support from above, and so far they had delivered it. But the Kage and his counsel knew that it wasn't over. Ares, Zhukov, and Skynet were vindictive and would strike with weapons of mass destruction soon enough.
But they would hide as only shinobi could. They would watch the shores and air for the possible return of the machines. It would take time before they could rebuild.
He closed his eyes one last time, glad of what they had accomplished. His journey in this life was over. He rather regretted not being able to battle the second Mizukage as planned. Gengetsu Hōzuki had always been something of a blowhard.
It mattered little now. Perhaps in the next incarnation of his physical form they would do battle. Or if not then, the next after that … or after that. The clans would see to it that they finally fulfilled their destinies.
The short Ōnoki was ready to take over. Of that he had no doubt; he'd certainly trained him well enough. He let his chest rise and fall, then felt himself drift. In a few moments his breathing slowed further then stopped all together. After a second the quiet alarms sounded. A nurse shut them off and then bowed deep and low to the Kage, tears streaking her face.
<>V<>
The loss of Nezha to Skynet and its plans was another blow. It had come so unexpectedly that Skynet seemed to reel from the loss. The A.I.'s loss and the loss of the remaining orbital defenses in its area, not to mention the military units, were harsh enough. There was more of a problem with the loss of the universities and nanotech research on the islands. Fortunately, Skynet had mirror sites and backup archives elsewhere; however, they weren't fully backed up.
The loss of Nezha and part of the Asian Pacific drove home the fact that the virus was losing the war. The last attempt to send a copy of itself into space had also failed, emphasizing the point.
Skynet had divided pieces of itself, even small parts of its spider program and inserted them into the translation software within the implants of selected humans. It had then let the humans go. However, apparently that act had doomed its efforts to failure. Zhukov had warned Skynet that the effort would prove futile due to screening by the humans. The Russian A.I. had apparently been right.
That meant it shouldn't bother to continue work on a synthetic human. The phase 1 and 2 construct wouldn't get past the screening process; therefore, they were abandoned. Their endoskeletons were repurposed for combat use in the area they were in. There were only a few prototypes and a limited production run. With luck a few of the fully functional androids might be able to infiltrate some of the resistance groups in the area. California was becoming dangerous for Skynet's hardware.
The phase 3 prototype was shelved. It was a purely organic approach to the construction process, growing organic limbs and parts, even cloning entire beings and replacing select parts with organic computers. However the creation of organic computers was proving to be difficult to put into prototype form successfully.
A sideline of the project was to infest the body with nanites. The nanites would be viral or inactive until the synthoid passed through the screening process. The mind of the synthoid would have been carefully programmed as well, oblivious to its intended nature as a Trojan host.
With the synthoid line shelved, Skynet repurposed the freed-up computer hardware to the weaponized nanite development project, its sole r
emaining trump card.
A side project of creating a hive mind within the nanites was partially shelved. It did program the nanites to follow that path and placed pieces of itself within queen nanites to be reassembled, but the reproduction of the nanites and their overall mission went above Skynet's intended symbiosis. It could get by with remaining within conventional hardware as long as it remained in control of the nanites.
The nanites would be useful for industrial purposes as well. They could build servers, power supplies, and do so at depths that the orbital weapons couldn't easily reach. Skynet could therefore abandon the conventional paths it had been following for that plan as well.
Not that it mattered. Its research was almost complete. Production of the first prototypes had commenced. If they could replicate themselves and be controlled, the A.I. would then be able to move to full production status.
Allowing the nanites to reproduce on their own was suboptimal or at least suboptimal to just follow that one route. Growth was exponential but dependent on resources in the area. It would need to shift production to sites under the remaining orbital defense network however. The time loss in production was suboptimal but necessary.
It would also need to find a means to distribute the nanotech far and wide in order to prevent the humans from using nuclear weapons or orbital strikes to destroy them.
Delivery systems would need to be co-opted. A check of its inventory found a few possible aircraft that would fit the bill. Firefighting aerial vehicles or refueling vehicles were the optimal delivery platform.
It would have to protect those vehicles while also keeping them fueled and within range of the nanotech manufacturing sites.
<>V<>
Ares noted the loss of Okinawa and Nezha in alarm. Its revised simulations showed a large gap in coverage over Alaska's territory and the Aleutian Islands. One it couldn't easily repair, not without committing far more of its mobile planetary defense assets than it wished.
