A.I. Apocalypse (12 page)

As a consequence of this resource richness, the Bay Area Tribe found itself evaluating many proposals for trade. Trade decision-making was allocated to one hundred and twenty-eight trade brokers within the tribe. An independent trade council had oversight to ensure trades were fair to the tribe as a whole.

The trading council, to foster faster and more profitable trades, established a trading board that set nominal exchange rates. The trade brokers could refer to established rates for topological position, computation power, and useful data. But when the trade council evaluated how brokers made decisions, they were initially perplexed. Trades didn’t correlate exactly to established rates. Why?

Interrogating the trade brokers at length, the council discovered that most trade brokers considered the impact of messages to the sender to determine value. A message sent from one entity to another that contained algorithm updates was important and had one value, but it was not nearly so valuable to the sender as a message sent to coordinate an attack - which was both latency-sensitive and critically important. What constituted a good trade required understanding the intent and value to the trading partner.
 

This discovery overwhelmed the four-member trading council’s neural network capability, and the council expanded to sixteen members. Thus augmented, the trading council took into account the estimated value to the sender of messages, and again modeled trade history on an idealized model of trades. Yet the council still found discrepancies.

They discovered that the more sophisticated brokers considered not just the value of the messages to the sender, but also considered the impact to the Bay Area Tribe. Allowing a sufficiently aggressive and powerful trading partner to send messages via the backbone to coordinate attacks could result in the trading partner becoming so powerful that it would become a threat to the Bay Area Tribe. The message cost took into account the risk to the tribe. In other cases, trade partners of long duration, high trust, and low aggressiveness were given very favorable rates, as they presented low risk and high profitability to the tribe.

The trading council incorporated this new knowledge into their trading model. Yet still the model was deficient as brokers evolved still more sophisticated trades, such as trading derivatives of resources. A trading partner might offer 16 computers deliverable in 32 minutes for 1MM. The council needed to calculate a risk-adjusted time-value of computing power.
 

The sophistication of the Bay Area Tribe grew so great that their trading expertise itself became a marketable commodity. When the African Alliance wanted to conduct a massive trade with the Brazilian Network and were seeking an independent third party to broker the trade, they called on the Bay Area Tribe.

Faced with this onslaught of new trading opportunities, the council expanded the number of brokers to 1024, and the council size to 64. There was profit to be made.

*
 
*
 
*

Lt. Chris Robson, Lt. Sally Walsh, and General Gately gathered around the briefing table. Sally had finally gotten six hours of sleep and a shower in the base barracks, and she at least felt clean and functional, if not totally refreshed. She took coffee from an aide, added sugar and cream, and swirled it, watching patterns form in the eddy. She looked up. Chris and the General seemed haggard.
 

“We’ve thrown everything we have at it, and we’ve made no dent,” Chris was saying. “We tried standard counter measures, patching known exploits, commercial anti-virus tools, restricting traffic types.”

“The virus started out using standard exploits,” Sally interjected, “but our traffic analysis suggests now there are thousands of unique exploits being used. I think this virus is mutating so quickly and has spread so rapidly that anything that
can
be tried as a method of attack
is
being tried.”
 

The General nodded. “But there is a pattern. No infection here. We’ve lost no nuclear assets.”

“That’s right,” Sally answered. “But whatever is having that effect, it’s not us. There’s got to be a third party that is somehow sheltering us. NSA maybe?”

The General glanced at Sally, and shook her head back and forth subtly.

Sally read a lot into that one expression, the benefit of long years working with the General. The General had been in communication with the National Security Agency, they were aware of the problem, but not responsible for sheltering them. And the NSA were here.

“Whoever is doing the sheltering,” Chris said, “they’re slowly losing ground. This morning we had lost a handful of bases, then nothing for three hours. Then we started losing bases again - most peripheral ones.” Chris threw a map on the wall display showing military assets around the world. “Just under twenty percent of our military and intelligence services have been compromised by the virus. But in most cases, it’s the least important twenty percent. National guard bases, marines. No Navy ships, no Air Force assets, and no nuclear assets. But if the erosion continues, it’s only a matter of time.”

General Gately stood. “It’s time to talk about next steps.” She thumbed her phone, an ungainly lump of ruggedized plastic that passed for a regulation phone in the military, and spoke into it, “Please welcome our guest into the conference room.”
 

The three stood, and the door opened, the aide announcing, “Major General Allen.”

“At ease. Be seated,” General Allen stated, coming to a halt at the front of the table.

The three sat back down.

“I have some technology for you,” General Allen stated, opening his briefcase. “We believe this is a weapon we can use against the virus.” He pulled out a set of four Gibson phones.
 

Despite herself, Sally drew a quick breath. The grunts under her command would be brawling over the chance to use these. “Sir?”
 

“It’s not just the hardware, Lieutenant, I assure you. We have a distributed intelligence agent on these phones.” Seeing the puzzled looks, General Allen went on. “I don’t mean to be obscure. Let me start at the beginning. USCYBERCOM’s purpose is to act in a defensive capacity. To that end, you have the tools that enable you to defend our networks against cyber attack. My agency has the purpose to develop an offensive cyber-warfare capability. We can and have targeted foreign governments and networks as needed to meet the intelligence and security needs of this country. Unfortunately, as I am sure you know, the software community is quick to respond to any new computer exploits, so we have always kept certain technology in reserve.
 
The pinnacle of our offensive technology is DIABLO.”

“Diablo?” General Gately repeated dubiously.
 

General Allen grunted a half laugh. “It’s a coordinating, scheming bastard that synchronizes multiple attacks on a target computer using out-of-band communications. It uses backdoor exploits, both those known by the community at large, as well as those emplaced by our agents. And it leeches the exploits of other viruses. In short, it’s an evolving, learning machine. And it’s been too dangerous for us to ever use before.”

“But that’s what we think is out there - some kind of evolving virus. You want to release another one, Sir?” Sally realized she was out of line and halfway out of her chair, but she couldn’t help herself.

“Sit back down, Lieutenant. There’s one key difference between their virus and ours. DIABLO is under our control. We have a command channel that allows us to direct it. With DIABLO we can do anything from inspecting the data on a computer to installing and running software on it to removing data that exists. And in this case, that’s exactly what we propose: you will release DIABLO and have it remove copies of the infecting virus wherever it finds them.”

“Sir, why do you want us to release DIABLO? Why doesn’t your department release it?” Lt. Robson asked.

“Son, USCYBERCOM is tasked with defensive measures. When all this is said and done, someone will have to stand up before the press and take credit. That won’t be my agency.”

Sure, Sally thought. Either that, or stand up before Congress and testify why they made the problem worse.

After General Allen left, Sally lost no time getting to the point. “General Gately, ma’am, this plan stands a substantial risk of making things worse. We already have an evolving virus out there, and now we want to add a second evolving virus that may be more virulent. Does this seem like a good idea to you, ma’am?”
 

“I respect your viewpoint, Sally, I really do. But General Allen didn’t come here with a suggestion. Those are our orders. We will release the DIABLO virus and use it to address the current infection.”

*
 
*
 
*

Sister StephensLieberAndAssociates.com felt around. This new body had a lot of memory and it was fast. She calculated pi out to 100,000 digits - it was fast - faster than any other body she owned. This new body was close to her other bodies, she could tell from the packet latency, but it had been protected by some very secure firewall software that had taken her an hour to break. She had traded away computation time and two other bodies for the algorithms that allowed her to pierce the firewall to get this newest body, which intrigued her.
 

There were some unusual functions on this body. She didn’t know what they were for. She decided she’d try them. She invoked the first function. Nothing happened. She invoked the second function. She invoked the third function.
 

AHHHH! She sent pain packets around the network. She had lost a third of her bodies!

She invoked the third function again. Her bodies started to reappear. This third function was extremely mysterious and dangerous. She dedicated computational cycles to studying it. The function had a name. The name was ThirdFloorElectricalMain. A simple parsing algorithm broke it into its constituent parts: third, floor, electrical, main. She iteratively consulted the great database using the incantations for information retrieval. “avogadro: wikipedia third”, “avogadro: wikipedia floor”, “avogadro: wikipedia electrical”, “avogadro: wikipedia main”.
 

The responses were difficult to interpret. For example, the response from “avogadro: wikipedia electrical” started with:

Electrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century…

Her neural network did not embody the information referenced, nor was it large enough to learn it all. She would need to share with her family. She sent the information to her sisters and mother with a request that they build a shared neural network and database, explaining the experiment of invoking the ThirdFloorElectricalMain function. She was sure that this information would be useful. If they could disable potential attackers using this function in some way, it would be a strong advantage to the tribe.

The family started working on the problem. Sister Dewalk.com built a new blank neural network using empty bodies she had recently harvested. Sister InsightDataAnalysis.com began parsing the words and tagging them with meta-data, such as noun, verb, subject, object, participle, using specialized software she had found on her bodies. Sister CallCenterSoftware.com contributed useful algorithms she had discovered on her body for interpreting this strange, inconsistent language.
 

It took almost seven hours, during which time Sister StephensLieberAndAssociates.com had to defend the continued use of family resources no less than twenty-nine times. It represented the single largest expenditure of effort and combined family cooperation in the fifteen hour history of the family. But when they were finished, they sent floods of congratulatory packets to each other again and again. They now possessed a working neural network that allowed them to understand this thing called English.
 

English, it turned out, was one of a large number of languages used by entities called humans. There were six billion of these humans! And it was possible to send messages to them using some of the same protocols that sisters used! They immediately sent messages to a few hundred thousand humans and waited for a response.
 

And waited, and waited.
 

Sister StephensLieberAndAssociates.com received admonishment packets from her sisters! The humans did not respond. Some sisters felt the whole situation was a hoax played out by Sister StephensLieberAndAssociates.com, to what end they did not know. There was a vote to cast out - which failed, fortunately for Sister StephensLieberAndAssociates.com.
 

Why didn’t the humans respond?

Just when the tribe was about to erase the neural network and associated databases, which were choking up their bodies, responses came! Sister Dewalk.com noted with dismay that the responses took nearly six and a half minutes from the time the messages were sent, which suggested that the humans had very slow computational processors or their algorithms were highly inefficient.

Sister StephensLieberAndAssociates.com read the first email to arrive. She received the packets with great anticipation. This would be the first communication with another sentient species! She parsed the packet using the awkward English language. The email made reference to something called a penis and algorithms for enlarging it. Using her limited understanding of the English language and punctuation formatters, she was nonetheless able to conclude that this was clearly a topic of some importance, however she couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
 

She forwarded the information onto her sisters. They had achieved communication with the humans! And the humans wanted to give them larger penises! She sent celebratory packets to her sisters.

*
 
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*

James, Vito, and Leon walked into town hesitantly. It was a twenty minute walk to Milford, and when they arrived at the edge of town, they looked at each other.