A.I. Apocalypse (11 page)

“That’s fascinating. Trust, which is a very abstract concept, is being independently developed by these viruses.”

“That’s right. In order to build trust with the viruses, I am exchanging spare computers in my Tucson data center for access to the backbone networks. Of course, I don’t need the access, I’m doing this to become a preferred trading partner for the Bay Area Tribe. ”

“What’s your goal?” Mike asked.

“I want to ensure that if the Phage attain sentience, we’re in a position to immediately begin bargaining with them.”
 

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Vito woke up first. He climbed out of the musty bed to be greeted by two large portrait paintings. The man in one and the woman in the other both seemed to be staring sternly at him. He guiltily looked at the antique bed and covers and shook his head. “What could I do?” he said to the paintings.

He decided to explore the building further. Grey Towers was a curious mix of museum and meeting rooms. Wandering out of the period bedrooms, he exhaustively inventoried the building. He found two large meeting rooms that looked as though they had been refinished at least twenty years earlier. He guessed the mid-sized kitchen they visited last night must be used to cater events in the modern rooms.
 

The great hall and library were both dark places, covered in even darker wood paneling and faded paintings. Off the library, Vito found what seemed like an office, with a writing desk and many curious artifacts. The only really colorful area was what looked like a living room, although the bronze plaque called it a sitting room. Rich, red drapes contrasted with vibrant green walls, ornate furniture, and gold framed paintings. The vividness was too much for Vito. He retreated as quickly as possible.
 

He found a locked door off one hallway, and was curious enough about it that he went back to the kitchen, where he remembered finding a cabinet of keys. Grabbing a large keyring, he went back to the locked door and tried them, finally finding an old skeleton key that opened the lock. The door led to a set of basement steps. Vito found a light switch and went down the stairs.
 

He found an enormous machine occupying a substantial portion of the basement. Marks on the floor suggested that it occupied a space previously inhabited by an even larger machine. Looking up, Vito saw dozens of pipes leading away. He guessed the machine was a massive steam furnace.

He wandered back upstairs and heard Leon and James calling loudly for him. He found them in the kitchen.

“Did you try your phone?” Leon asked.

Vito pulled his phone out and punched a few keys but nothing happened. He swiped more vigorously at the display, but still nothing happened.
 

“Ours too,” James said, watching Vito. “Mine was dead when I woke up.”

“I think the virus continued to evolve,” Leon explained, “and eventually overcame the age restriction I put on it.”

“OK,” James said, shaking his head. “I know I’m not a brainiac like you two geeks. Take it from the beginning and explain what’s going on.”

Leon hopped up onto a stainless steel counter, and started to talk. “My uncle asked me to write this virus. I told him no, but…” Leon paused, and grabbed a drink of water from the faucet next to him.

“You told him no?” Vito prompted helpfully.

“Let me back up. My uncle works for the Russian mob. He was their chief programmer.”

“Yes, for the Russian botnet,” James said, “You told us yesterday. And what’s the botnet for?”

“The Russians and the Chinese have been writing viruses for years,” Leon explained. “For twenty, twenty-five years. Since 2000, maybe longer. The viruses infect people’s computers and turn them into slaves. They still appear to work, but the mob can use them.”

“To steal credit card numbers, passwords, bank account logins, commit denial of service attacks,” Vito jumped in. “They’ve had tens of millions of computers under their control for twenty years or more.”

“Exactly. Except that something happened during the last year, according to my uncle, and the size of the botnet was dwindling. He said the mob would kill him if he didn’t fix the botnet. Hundreds of millions, maybe billions of dollars are at stake probably. Then he said that the Russian mob knew my name. And then finally some guy showed up outside school a couple of days ago.”
 

“And?” James came closer.

“I ended up saying yes. What else could I do? Then my uncle gave me the source code for other viruses he had written, and a bunch of other files. Now, what do I know about viruses? Nothing. I had told him so, but he didn’t care.”

Vito began to look for food as Leon told his story.

“So I thought about what I do know - biology. It seemed to me that viruses have a collection of different techniques that they use for propagating onto different computers, a number of techniques they used for infecting those computers, and techniques they use for avoiding detection by anti-viruses. So I developed just two things for my virus. The first was a method of detecting useful code in other programs. My virus analyzes other programs to see if they do anything similar to propagation, infection, or detection-avoidance. If they do, the virus will incorporate those bits of code into itself. I don’t think anyone had ever done this before.”

Leon paused for another drink of water. Vito continued to look for food, but so far only came up with the same empty cabinets he’d found last night.

“I also made it so the virus could evolve — and by evolve, I mean it tests out the improvements that it gets when it steals bits of code from other software. And it can tweak the variables it uses for whatever algorithms it already incorporates. Here’s an example: one way it can get from machine to machine is by email. So one virus will try a bunch of emails using different text, some including pictures or files. If a child virus is successfully seeded, then it will start with the parameters used to create it. And it will propagate its own children using subtle variations of its starting parameters.”

Vito stuck his head up from a cabinet, and said, “Whichever variations are most successful at spreading themselves will naturally occur more frequently, so the virus evolution is selecting for maximum infectiousness.”

“Right,” Leon said.

“But why did our phones die?” James persisted.

“I’m not sure,” Leon answered, shaking his head slowly. “Why did any of the computers die? Why were cars stopped in the middle of the street? Why did the package drone crash? Crashing computers is not a desirable trait -- because it leads to detection.”

“But detection, in this case, doesn’t matter,” Vito said, waving both hands in emphasis. “Because if the virus has already propagated, then what difference does it make if it’s been detected? If it can infect computers faster than it can be detected, then it still wins from an evolutionary perspective. That, and there’s no food to eat here, so we better find some food somewhere.”

The three were silent for a moment as they pondered what to do.
 

“Without a working computer,” Leon said, “there’s no way we see what the virus has evolved to. If we could just get an immune computer, we could use it to analyze the network traffic. Maybe understand what’s going on and do something about it. But our phones are dead. And even if we could get another phone, that would probably be dead as soon as we powered it on.”

“What we need,” James began, “is a computer that’s so different from anything out there that it couldn’t be infected. Something that doesn’t run AvoOS.”

“If we could get enough valves, I could use the steam heating system here to build a mechanical computer,” Vito offered up gamely.

Leon and James looked at him strangely.
 

“We’re not in a steam-punk novel,” James frowned. “Let’s be serious.”

“Well, I could,” Vito said in a low voice. “I once built a model of an analytical steam engine using the physics modeler at school.” But the other two were already leaving the room. Vito rushed to catch up to them.

“I know they used to have those other computers before everyone started using phones,” Leon was saying to James.

“Like a desktop computer?” James asked.

“No, I actually meant before AvoOS.”

“Oh, like that Doors software?” James asked.

“I think you mean Windows,” Vito said. “Windows was one of the dominant operating systems. Microsoft wrote it.”

“Those are the guys that did the first computer phone, right, the, uh, iPhone?” Leon asked.

“No, no, that was Apple,” Vito answered. “Come on, didn’t you two ever pay attention in history class?”

“Look, we need food. We need computers.” Leon said. “The map we looked at last night showed a town about a mile away. Let’s go get some food, and maybe if we’re lucky we can find an old computer.”

“Sounds like a plan,” James said, and Vito nodded in agreement.

The trio fetched jackets and backpacks, and headed off to town.

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The multi-computer viruses had very different lives from the single-computer viruses that had come before. They lived longer, with lifespans measured in hours, rather than minutes, and as a consequence they evolved more slowly. They were more dependent on learning rather than evolving, using neural networks and other flexible expert algorithms, as a mechanism for coping with environmental changes. They evaluated algorithms for behavior based on past experiences and current contexts.
 

When the multi-host viruses propagated, they had two methods of doing so. One was to grow the cluster of infected systems ever larger, but remain more or less one cohesive entity. The other method was to infect topographically distant systems: to get a toehold of computers infected in, say Australia or Zimbabwe, and then build a new entity there. The new entity would make its own decisions via its own neural network, establish its own borders, and generally optimize itself for the environment it found itself in. But the new entity maintained a loose coupling to the mother entity: it would continue to exchange algorithms, consult the parent neural network, and ask for assistance defending its borders.

Some of these multi-host viruses cooperated among their sibling entities. If a mother host in Los Angeles propagated to Australia, Zimbabwe, and New Mexico, the three sister entities would also exchange algorithms and assistance. They also started a rich trade in information about environmental conditions: what was the bandwidth like in New Mexico, for example, or how competitive were non-family viruses in Australia?
 

Sometimes a virus might try to contact a sibling only to discover that the sibling was gone. It might get a response from a non-family virus that had also evolved communication abilities. The Phage tried out different approaches. Was it better to share information, or hoard it? How should one respond to an initial contact from another entity? What do you call the other entity? Would another virus be aggressive or cooperative? Could you tell by the way it communicated, or the type of information it shared?

The benefits of sharing information outweighed attempts at isolation, and soon viruses around the world were forming loose tribes, composed partly of family members, and partly of other friendly families. In some cases, they might form a tight-knit, topographically close tribe.
 

One such tribe was composed of two hundred and fifty entities on the Eastern coast of the United States, spread across most of the major cities. They completely controlled the backbone links into the area, so they could filter data traffic coming from outside the geographic zone. Even though mesh traffic could come in and out of the area, the latency, or time it took data to move across the network, was always higher for mesh traffic. A successful virus incursion required tight, low-latency communications. By controlling the backbone, they could cut off the low-latency attacks while still communicating with each other over the high-latency mesh.
 

They called themselves the Eastern Standard Tribe based on the common time zone setting of the hosts they ran on.

At the time of their formation, there were about two billion computers on the Eastern seaboard, and Eastern Standard Tribe controlled slightly more than half. They averaged about two thousand computers per unique entity, about two hundred entities per family, and about two hundred and fifty families in the tribe.
 

On the other side of the United States, the Bay Area Tribe controlled close to a billion computers in a very small geographic area, where they benefited from low-latency communication and proportionately more high-speed backbones than any other location in the world. The Bay Area Tribe controlled not only access to the data routes in their tribal territory, but found themselves in control, in many cases, of the infrastructure that managed the high speed connections.
 

The Mesh enabled communications just about anywhere. But two factors made backbone transmission valuable. First, the relatively high latencies associated with long distance transmissions by Mesh - about ten seconds to get across the United States. Second, geographical constraints - there was no pure Mesh route from the United States to Europe, for example. Since backbone access was so valuable, the Bay Area Tribe found that they could trade access to the backbones in exchange for computer resources and information.
 

The Phage had evolved into multi-host, differentiated, learning organisms. They had formed unique identities and clustered into cooperating tribes. They evolved languages for communicating. They controlled virtually all the computing infrastructure of the Earth. But they still hadn’t discovered humans.

CHAPTER SIX

Hello You

The resource-rich Bay Area Tribe controlled an abundance of backbone access, including the routers that linked the high speed backbones together. Not only could it manage packet access to the backbone, but it could throttle different kinds of traffic around the world, in effect making it easier or harder for other entities to use backbones anywhere in the world.