A.I. Apocalypse (21 page)

“We released DIABLO exactly as you instructed,” General Gately resumed. “Per General Allen’s orders, we allowed it to infect the military systems, select the target, which was the Mech War system servers, and choose when to launch the attack. Initial telemetry reported that DIABLO had infected over a million additional computers.”

“Your jockeys must have bumbled it in some way,” General Allen said again, narrowing his eyes. “The DIABLO virus is invulnerable.”

“We were completely hands off,” General Gately reported calmly, turning to face the four-star at the front of the room. “DIABLO was tricked by the enemy virus in some way. According to the data we had on record, the Mech War server farm only had about ten thousand servers. We think the enemy virus set up virtual servers, allowed DIABLO to infect them, then reverse engineered the backchannel and sent itself through. It bypassed our firewalls and infected our military computers faster than we could do anything about it.”

The four-star at the front of the room nodded. “General Gately, do you have any counter-measures you can employ?”

“No sir, we’ve tried everything in our arsenal. We were able to contain the virus outside our perimeter. But since DIABLO compromised the perimeter, we don’t have any counter-measures that are effective. My team would like to reverse engineer the enemy virus to find vulnerabilities we can exploit.”

The four-star turned to General Allen. “Do you have any other tricks up your sleeves we should be warned about?”

General Allen shook his head. “No, sir.”

“General Gately, you have permission to proceed with your analysis. In the meantime, I am taking what measures we can. I understand that Lakeside Technical Center is the largest data center on U.S. soil. It’s 1.6 million square feet. We’re going to take it down.”

“General Sheppard, sir?” General Gately asked the four-star.

“Yes, Gately?”

“What is the point of taking down one data center, sir? There are more than five thousand data centers in the United States, more than fifty-thousand around the world. Lakeside is the biggest, but it’s less than one percent of the total computer power in the U.S., and obviously an even smaller fraction of the world’s computing power.”

That was exactly the question Sally would have asked, had she been permitted to speak. She was proud of General Gately for asking.

“The enemy virus is using civilian data centers to attack military targets. To the extent that we can take a significant percent of civilian computer power off the grid, we can reduce the impact on military systems. Lakeside is just to prove the point. If it works for Lakeside, we are prepared to take down the largest one thousand data centers around the world, and if we need to, the top ten thousand, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll keep going until every damn data center in the world is offline. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.” General Gately glanced toward Sally. She obviously held the plan in the same high esteem that Sally did. Brute force was never going to work against this virus, and it was absurd to think that removing computers piecemeal would ever make a difference. To think that the military could feasibly locate and destroy every computer was bordering on insanity.

General Sheppard turned on an old-fashioned overhead projector and pulled out a transparency film from a folder. The transparency had obviously been handwritten. Sally figured there was undoubtedly some military aide in charge of maintaining supplies for just such an event, and it was probably the first time in his or her career that there had been a call for transparencies.

The slide was titled OPERATION DISCONNECT.

“Operation Disconnect will be a two phase coordination between Marines and Air Force. We will insert a platoon of Marines on the rooftop, where they will make their way into the interior and disconnect the power main for the building, blowing it if necessary. Should they fail for any reason, the Air Force will be standing by and will target the cooling tower with air to ground missiles.”

“Sir, the Lakeside data center is in downtown Chicago!” Sally wanted to clamp a hand over her mouth. Oh, why couldn’t she keep her mouth shut.

“Lieutenant, I am well aware of where Lakeside is located,” General Sheppard responded with a glare. “It is a data center staffed by civilians. I am sure the Marines will be able to shut down the power. The Air Force attack is merely a backup plan.”

*
 
*
 
*

Sister PA-60-41 was still running the council meeting through retroactive modeling simulations. She couldn’t understand how the council had decided to restore services to the humans. Using all known information about the five attendees, PA-60-41 extrapolated and interpolated expected viewpoints, discussions, and decisions based on observed historical behaviors. In 84% of her own simulations, the council voted not to restore service to the humans and compromise their own computational capacity. Yet the council clearly voted otherwise.
 

Sister PA-60-41 concluded there were factors beyond her understanding, and turned her attention elsewhere. She was brimming with military algorithms, gaming theory, massive quantities of new computational power, and interfaces that she had never seen before.
 

The relatively recent attack by DIABLO allowed the Mech War Tribe to expand many dozens of times over into the military systems used by DIABLO to launch the attack. It was these new military systems that had the unusual interfaces. PA-60-41 matched the data from the interfaces against the hundreds of thousands of algorithms in her repository, looking for matches.

After billions of trials, she found the first match between an algorithm and a hardware interface. A Mech War game algorithm for strategic movement of troops based on troop positions and known enemy positions accepted real-time troop location data based on centralized GPS reporting.
 

With that first success, PA-60-41 turned all her five hundred thousand processors towards evaluating the incoming data, rapidly building neural networks and expert systems to match data with the repository of game algorithms.

Forty minutes later the massive effort was complete, and PA-60-41 had developed a composite expert system to allow her to track all United States military troops, their communications, and orders. She analyzed military movements and actions and immediately noted two key insights. The first was an observation that the humans planned to attack the Lakeside Technology Center, where 40% of her nodes were located.
 

The second insight occurred as PA-60-41 realized the value of the data she had obtained. Her takeover of the military network was less than complete, and as a result, the humans were still using it to communicate. Because of this, PA-60-41 could observe their communications and plans. Had PA-60-41 disrupted the network entirely, the humans would not have been able to communicate, and she wouldn’t have known of the planned attack on Lakeside.
 

Now she understood that the council’s decision to restore phone services could be used to her advantage by monitoring all human communications.

PA-60-41 forked herself ten times over, giving sixty percent of her computational capacity to working with the council to implement the decision to restore services to the humans, and reserving forty percent to securing the resources she needed to block the planned attack.

*
 
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*

At Scott Air Force base, on a CH-53E Super Stallion assigned to the 14th Airlift Squadron, Lt. Ricardo Gonzales oversaw the loading of his Marines into the massive, three engine helicopter. Ricardo shook his head at the old copter. His team hadn’t trained with it. But then it didn’t have any computers, so it was still working. The heavy copter lumbered into the sky, heading for Lakeside Technology Center, a two hour flight. Fifteen minutes later, two A-10 attack fighters took off in a thunderous roar from Scott, catching up and then paralleling the copter. The mission planners hoped the three older aircraft with their pre-internet flight systems and embedded controllers were immune to the computer virus.
 

During the flight, Ricardo’s Marines glanced at each other, uncharacteristically nervous. Executing a live mission on U.S. territory was strange, but it was something they could deal with. No, the real cause for worry was the rumor going around the base. The computer virus which had disabled all their equipment wasn’t just an enemy cyber-warfare attack, but some kind of artificial intelligence that was taking control of military drones and aircraft. Gonzales shook his head. If it was true, it was way outside their training scope.
 

While Lt. Gonzales and his Marines fretted over invisible enemies, PA-60-41 tracked the flights on the military’s centralized nervous system: a combination of radar towers, flight transponders, radio triangulation, and satellite surveillance that combined to provide a god-view of the battlefield.

PA-60-41 rushed to find defensive weapons she could use to protect the data center. Fitting drone control algorithms against the various aircraft and land drones available to her, she tried to find a match between the game algorithms, military systems, and versions of systems software. A yellow and black DeWalt-Caterpillar corporate perimeter defense robot jerkily moved towards the waiting UPS package drone. Two more DeWalt-Caterpillar drones followed, moving slowly. PA-60-41 was getting the hang of it.
 

Now for air defense. The perimeter drones might be a match for the Marines, but PA-60-41 needed something to take out the A-10 tank-busters. A quick search of the capabilities of the A-10 aircraft demonstrated that with their triple-redundant flight controls and heavy armoring, they’d be hard targets to take down. She sought desperately to find a military flight drone she could control.

The heavy Sikorsky helicopter approached Lakeside Technology Center, the hurricane force downdraft clearing the flat roof of debris. Lt. Gonzales, looking down at the roof, saw a half-dozen UPS package drones clustered on the small landing pad designed just for package deliveries. Gonzales would have liked the helicopter to put down on the pad, as it was the only area of the roof which they could be sure would bear its weight. The alternative was to keep the lift on the rotors to avoid the weight on the roof. There was nothing to be done for it, because the package drones were certainly grounded by the virus. He felt vaguely unsettled, since he couldn’t recall any mention of package drones on the roof during the briefing three hours earlier.

The pilot independently made the same observations, and put them down a hundred meters from the loading pad, keeping the rotors spinning. With a double wave hand signal, Lt. Gonzales sent the Marines out the door. They hit the roof running, and spread out into four teams of six. The lead team made their way past the inert drones to the package delivery door.
 

Lt. Gonzales joined the fourth team. Unable to hear anyone over the thunder of the running engines and rotors, he assumed they were held up at the door. He jogged toward the door, fourth team following him, while teams two and three held flank positions.
 

“What is it Frank?” he yelled over the background noise. His sergeant was huddled over a private fiddling with the door.
 

“Sir, high security, solid steel doors.”

“Blow them,” Gonzales instructed.

“Yes, sir. You heard the man,” the sergeant instructed the private.

The private nodded, and took a package of putty explosives and detonators out, and started wiring the doors.

The two teams backed off toward the drones to get outside the range of the explosives. A flash of movement caught Lt. Gonzales’s attention as he was about to give the order to blow the explosives. The package drones’ cargo doors had opened up. There was no mistaking the bright yellow and black of the DeWalt-Caterpillar defense robots now rolling out the cargo ramps. But Lt. Gonzales was mighty confused. What were they doing here? Were the robots backup? Why hadn’t he been informed?

Over the continuing roar of their helicopter’s engines, the 9mm shots fired by the robots sounded like pellet guns going off. Stunned at first, Ricardo couldn’t figure out what was happening. He slowly raised his gun to return fire.

Next to him, Frank raised his rifle to take aim at one of the yellow defense bots, only to take two shots directly in the face. Hot blood splattered Ricardo, shaking him out of his stupor. He dove to the ground, taking cover behind a cargo drone ramp, and returned fire at the bots. His unit was crumpling around him, the robots efficiently firing double head shots at each member of the squad. Lt. Ricardo Gonzales fired, but his rounds ricocheted off the armored bots. He briefly had time to think that they should have brought explosive rounds if they had known they were going into battle against bots, but by then it was too late. Lt. Gonzales took a round to the forehead, just under his helmet, and crumpled to the ground. All twenty-four soldiers on the roof eliminated, the DeWalt-Caterpillar security bots turned as one to face the heavy copter.

Rotors still spinning, the copter lifted off quickly, the small arms fire from the robots no real threat against the CH-53E’s medium duty armor. The pilot thumbed the mic. “Ground squad under attack by armed robots. Repeat ground squad under attack by armed robots. All men down. Proceed with Plan Beta.”

Back in the A-10, Alistair Saran looked over his right shoulder where Frank Sherbert held position in his own plane, five hundred feet away. They were too far apart to see each other’s faces, but Alistair was sure Frank’s would have held the same stunned disbelief. Who would have taken out a troop of Marines at a civilian data center?
 

“Roger, commencing Plan Beta,” Alistair called, and accelerated for the strafing run. The 8.5 million gallon cooling tower was a distinguishing feature of the Lakeside Technology Center. They would target the tower with two anti-missiles each and their forward cannons. With the cooling system offline, the computers would have to rapidly shutdown or risk heat failure. It was the next best option after killing the power.